When, as Americans, we look back at the decade of the 1930s, we often see only the Great Depression. It was a calamitous time for the country and it may be difficult for us to imagine that anything good actually occurred during it. People, we may think, didn't thrive during this decade. At best, they just survived. But for the two people who are at the center of this story, the decade of the 1930s was the one in which events conspired to bring them together in Cleveland; to allow them to fall in love; and to finally inspire them, just as they started their life together, to take a huge risk and start their own industrial motion picture company. Today, more than 80 years later, that company—Cinecraft Productions, Inc.—is still in business and, according to the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, is now the oldest surviving industrial film company in the United States.

First, a few words about industrial films, otherwise known as sponsored or non-theatrical films. These were films produced for the benefit of, and paid for by, private sector companies, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, the federal government, or state or local governments. In the first half of the twentieth century, the making of such films by motion picture companies developed into a large industry in the United States. Thousands of such films were produced in this period, many more than the number of entertainment films produced in Hollywood during the same period.

Some industrial films were produced to promote the products of large industrial and utility companies like General Electric, Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), Ohio Bell and Westinghouse; others to train industrial workers at steel mills, auto factories and other production sites; others to train members of the United States military on how to perform their duties; and still others to alert the public to a health risk or other public emergency. In the years before televisions became available in the United States to the general public, many of these films were shown in movie theaters as a prelude to the main attraction.

The story of the two people who founded Cinecraft Productions is itself worthy of a film. One of the two was Elizabeth "Betty" Buehner. She was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1914. Her father Albin was a soldier who fought in the Great War, as World War I was called at that time. After the war ended, he came home to his wife Franziska and five-year old daughter, and together they experienced the financial and psychological trauma that many German families experienced in the aftermath of that war. Hoping for a better life, Betty's parents decided to immigrate to the United States. Her father traveled first, arriving in Cleveland in 1922, where, according to family lore, his brother found him work as a laborer on theTerminal Tower project. In 1923, the now nine-year old Betty and her mother joined him here. While the Buehner family may have been very optimistic in the first years after their arrival, things didn't turn out for them the way they hoped.

The family struggled to make ends meet and then, in 1928, Betty's mother died suddenly. Her father found himself unable to care for a teenage daughter and sent her off to live with and work as a nanny, first for a family in Shaker Heights and then later for one in Lakewood. Betty survived it all and, in the process, learned to speak English so well that, according to her son, years later no one could detect even a hint of a German accent when she spoke. She attended Lakewood High where she was active in a number of school organizations, graduating in 1934. Before long, the resourceful and hard-working young woman found employment and was living on her own. And then, just a few years out of high school, she landed the job which would change her life. Through a connection she had made as a nanny in Shaker Heights, she was hired to work as a film editor (then called a "cutter") for Tri-State Motion Picture Company, a pioneer industrial film production company whose offices were then located in the Rockefeller Building in downtown Cleveland. Betty Buehner was working there in 1938 when she met Ray Culley.

Raymond "Ray" Culley came from a very different world. He was born in Norwalk, Ohio, in 1904, the oldest son of working-class parents whose families had lived in Norwalk for several generations. Ray dropped out of school in his teens and went to work as a watchmaker's apprentice. In the 1920s, he worked in jewelry stores in Norwalk, Columbus, and West Virginia. In this early work, he demonstrated creativity and a willingness to take risks to succeed. While working in West Virginia, he taught himself how to fly a plane so that he could perform aerial stunts that would not only impress potential customers but also demonstrate the durability of his product.

In 1930, after the economy collapsed and the country lurched into the Great Depression, Ray found himself thinking that perhaps the only people who could now afford to buy his jewelry were Hollywood actors. So, the 26-year-old bought a car and drove across the country to southern California. Once there, he didn't sell jewelry for very long, as he soon found more profitable work at some of Hollywood's early motion picture studios. He first worked as an actor, landing bit roles in Westerns which featured big-name actors like Gene Autry, Hoot Gibson and Hopalong Cassidy. But later, in the way that things sometimes go in Hollywood, he found himself on the other end of the camera, first as a production assistant and then an assistant director. He was working in that latter capacity in 1937 when Tri-State contacted Republic Pictures, where Ray was then working, looking for a director. Tri-State's director, Jack T. Flanagan, had died in October 1936 following a film-shooting accident and the company needed someone to direct an industrial film that the company had contracted to produce for General Electric. Republic dispatched Ray to Cleveland where he directed that film, titled "From Now On." Tri-State must have been impressed by the young director, because, before Ray could return to Hollywood, he was hired as Tri-State's new director. And it was there that Ray Culley met Betty Buehner.

Their sons don't know—and it's unlikely that anyone now still living knows—the complete story of how, when and why the two Tri-State employees fell in love. What we do know is this. Shortly after Ray's arrival at Tri-State, Betty left the company and moved to New York where she hoped to learn more about the film editing business. As part of his duties with Tri-State, Ray was required to make regular trips to New York to have new industrial films edited. Ray and Betty likely met in New York during these trips, because, in the spring of 1939, Ray made a special trip to New York and, on that trip, the two married. They then returned to Cleveland where, after a very short period, they founded the company they called Cinecraft Productions.

In 1999, some sixty years later, Ray's younger brother Paul stated in an interview that Ray and Betty started Cinecraft Productions because Ray had had a "falling out" with Tri-State. It is not known whether this "falling out" preceded his marriage to Betty, but the two certainly were ready with a plan when they returned to Cleveland. Ray's father lent the newlyweds $1500—the equivalent of approximately $30,000 today—to purchase a camera and tripod. Betty persuaded Ray that he should shoot movies with 16mm film, instead of the traditional 35mm, as she believed it was the future for industrial films. And the two quickly went into business together, at first operating Cinecraft Productions out of their west side apartment, but later out of an office and studio in the Card Building, which then stood on St. Clair Avenue East, near Ontario Street, where the Cleveland Marriott Hotel at Key Tower stands today.

In the same year that Ray and Betty Culley started their business, they successfully produced their first film. Titled "You Bet Your Life," it was made for the Cleveland Railway Company and designed to alert riders about the rules of safety while traveling on the company's streetcars. In time, other businesses came their way, some via advertising companies impressed with the couple. Ray's artful script work, skillful directing and affable personality, coupled with Betty's knowledge of film editing, frugality and business management skills, made the two an early era power couple in Cleveland industrial filmmaking. It enabled them to survive the early years, as difficult as they may have been, and to then begin growing their business from the ground up.

In the 1940s, Betty Culley was presented with a new challenge as she gave birth to the couple's twin boys in 1944 and then to a third son several years later. She continued to work for Cinecraft Productions, the 1950 federal census listing her as an "executive" with the company. Her sons, looking back to when they were children, remember the nanny who came to their house in Rocky River to watch them, allowing their mom to jump into her car to drive to the company's offices and attend to . . . well, to whatever needed her attention. In 1947 that drive became a little shorter after the company purchased the historic building at 2515 Franklin Boulevard on the west side of Cleveland and moved all of its operations there. The Culleys remodeled the building—which was designed and built to house Cleveland Public Library's first branch library—creating a large studio and offices for the company's art work, film editing, and other departments.

The Culleys operated Cinecraft Productions from this west side location for decades, creating hundreds of quality industrial films for entities like the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Transit System, Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, Republic Steel, Westinghouse, Sohio, General Electric, and many other business and government organizations. Along the way, the company became one of the early pioneers in the film industry to use three cameras with teleprompters operating in synch with each other to shoot the same movie scene from three different angles. The industrial films that Cinecraft Productions produced often featured local talent from the Cleveland Play House, but the company was also able to land some big names from Hollywood and other parts of the country. The list of actors and other notables who traveled to Cleveland to be in industrial films directed by Ray Culley included Basil Rathbone, Merv Griffin, Joe E. Brown, Don Ameche, Danny Kaye, Joel Grey, Tim Conway, Ernie Anderson (Ghoulardi), and future United States presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

In 1970, Ray and Betty Culley retired, selling Cinecraft Productions to Ray's younger brother Paul. In 1986, Paul, after 16 years of ownership in which he guided the company in its transition from 16mm films to video films, retired too. Cinecraft Productions was then purchased by a company employee, Neil McCormick, and his wife Maria Keckan. McCormick and Keckan shepherded in another major change in the company's history by transitioning it from video to digital media production, and positioning the company to become a local leader in the production of e-learning courses.

The love story of Ray and Betty Culley, which produced Cinecraft Productions, Inc., came to an end in 1983 when Ray died. Betty went on to live for almost three more decades before dying at the age of 102 in 2016. Today, as noted earlier, Cinecraft Productions is believed to be the longest surviving industrial film company in the United States. This suggests that not only does love conquer all, but sometimes it also survives all too.

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The house at 4206 Franklin Boulevard is one of only a few Second Empire style houses on Franklin Boulevard. It has approximately 3,000 square feet of living area and is notable for its hexagonal mansard roof, decorative window hoods and wrap-around single-story covered front porch. The house was built in 1866 and, while the name of the contractor who actually built it is unknown, it may have been Ferdinand Dreier (Dryer), a German immigrant and house carpenter by trade. Dreier built a number of houses on or near Franklin Boulevard in the late 1860s, including a somewhat similar Second Empire style house almost directly across the street at 4211 Franklin.

According to National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) records of the Franklin Boulevard Historic District, the house at 4206 Franklin is named for Thomas Axworthy, a nineteenth century coal merchant, who purchased it in 1873. Its original owner was Atherton Curtis, a liquor dealer, whose family only lived in the house for a year or so before moving to Huron County, Ohio. The family then rented the house out to tenants for several years before selling it to Axworthy, who lived in the house with his wife Rebecca and their three daughters for more than a decade.

Thomas Axworthy was an interesting figure who left his mark on Cleveland city government, although not in the way you might think. An English immigrant, Axworthy became involved in Cleveland politics in the 1870s, serving in that decade as a city fire commissioner as well as president of the "West Side Democracy," a political club for Democrats living west of the Cuyahoga River. In 1883, while his star was still rising, Axworthy was considered to be a likely candidate for city mayor, but he ran instead for city treasurer and was elected in a close race. He was re-elected to the office in 1885 and again in 1887. By the time he was re-elected the second time, he had already sold the house at 4206 Franklin, moving, like many other Franklin Boulevard residents during this period, to the city's far west end. There, he built a grand house on Lake Avenue, not far from where political kingmaker Marcus Hanna, also a Franklin Boulevard resident, would build his Lake Avenue mansion just a few years later.

In October 1888, Thomas Axworthy's political star crashed and burned when the Cleveland Leader broke the news that he had fled the city after embezzling some $440,000 from the city treasury. (To appreciate the size of his embezzlement, that sum would be almost $13 million in 2022 dollars.) The papers, not only in Cleveland, but across the country, were abuzz for months with stories of Axworthy's whereabouts, the efforts made by Cleveland to recover the funds he had stolen, and the inevitable litigation that followed. The person who headed the effort to locate Axworthy was attorney Andrew Squire, who just two years later would co-found Squire, Sanders and Dempsey, for many years one of Cleveland's largest and most prestigious law firms. Squire also happened to be a former neighbor of Axworthy, having lived just three houses down the street from Axworthy during the years that the latter resided on Franklin. Squire doggedly searched for Axworthy, located him in London, and traveled all the way there to confront the disgraced treasurer who was living in England's capital under an assumed name. Squire successfully negotiated a settlement with Axworthy which required him to surrender all of the cash and bonds still in his possession, and agree to sell properties that he still owned back in the States--which included Colorado and Tennessee as well as Ohio--to cover much of the rest of what he had stolen. In the end, after bondsmen made up the difference, the City of Cleveland was fully reimbursed for its loss.

After the Axworthy family moved from the house at 4206 Franklin, it was next owned and occupied by the family of a district passenger agent for the Erie Railroad and after that by a treasurer of a trucking company. In 1919, the house was purchased by a Hungarian immigrant whose family lived in it for four years before selling it to Clement and Katherine Folkman in 1923. Clement, a German immigrant who worked in Cleveland as an auto body builder, and his wife Katherine, a Hungarian immigrant, were among a large number of German and Hungarian immigrants who settled on and around Franklin Boulevard in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. A number of them, like the Folkmans, purchased grand houses on Franklin that had once been occupied by the West Side's wealthiest families, and then converted them into multi-family dwellings or rooming houses. The Folkmans created three suites in the house at 4206 Franklin, living in one themselves and renting out the other two.

Clement and Katherine Folkman's son Clement, Jr., who was sixteen years old when his parents bought the house at 4206 Franklin, initially entered the workplace as an auto body builder like his father. In 1936, however, when he was 29 years old, he decided to become a different type of body builder. "Clem," as he was referred to by his family, was an adherent of the "physical culture" theories of Bernarr McFadden, an American entrepreneur who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, advocated physical fitness through weight lifting regimens. McFadden later published a series of popular magazines which may have caught young Clem's eyes. With his father's help, Clem built a gymnasium in the two-story carriage house that stood in the rear yard of their property. An avid weightlifter himself, Clem soon was training young men in the neighborhood at his Folkman's Athletic Club, which he later renamed Folkman's Physical Culture Studio. By October 17, 1938, when an article about his gym appeared in the Plain Dealer, he was training 50 young men, ages 20 to 30, who came to the gym three times a week, some with Olympic medal aspirations.

For decades, Folkman's Physical Culture Studio was a popular gym and rare commercial enterprise on historically residential Franklin Boulevard. The Folkman family at some point in time built another two-story building on the property, the first story of which served as a garage, and connected the new building to the old carriage house, which itself was extensively remodeled to accommodate Clem's growing business. The gym was located on the second floor of the remodeled carriage house, and a locker room, sauna, and massage room on the first. A large round clock was also installed on a pole in the front yard that for years reminded passers by on Franklin that it was "Time To Exercise." The gym was still thriving in 1967 when legendary Plain Dealer reporter Bill Hickey paid a visit to Folkman's gym. By this time, Clem's son Ronald, a Cleveland firefighter, was also working part-time at the gym as a masseuse. Bill Hickey referred to the two of them in an article that appeared in the Plain Dealer on March 30, 1967, as "the Squires of Franklin Boulevard." When Hickey reminded Clem that he had been exercising at the gym for years, Clem, according to the article, took one look at Hickey's body and responded, "Please don't tell anybody that. It will ruin me."

In 1986, the Folkman Physical Culture Studio had been operating at 4206 Franklin Boulevard for 50 years. Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter James Neff visited the property in August of that notable anniversary year to interview Clem Folkman. When he arrived, he found an elderly man who was gravely ill and reliving past glories, and a gymnasium that was literally falling apart and papered with city building code violation notices. Clem Folkman died just three months after this interview. After the death of Clem Folkman, one of his grandsons attempted to revive the business, but was unsuccessful. In 1991, the house at 4206 Franklin Boulevard was sold to a new owner, and one year after that the buildings on the rear of the property, which had housed Folkman's Physical Culture Studio for more than a half century, were unceremoniously torn down.

Today, no evidence remains of the Folkman Physical Culture Studio where Clem Folkman trained so many Clevelanders for so many years in the theories, methodologies and regimens of Bernarr McFadden. The Thomas Axworthy House, however, now nicely renovated as a three-family dwelling, and celebrating its 156th birthday in 2022, still stands at 4206 Franklin Boulevard.

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The Cook-Bousfield mansion at 3105 Franklin Boulevard was originally built in 1853 for businessman Hiram Cook. It was constructed in the popular Italianate style. Not much is known about Hiram Cook, other than that he was a wealthy lumber dealer in the area. Cook sold the residence early on, and notable Cleveland residents John and Sarah Bousfield (née Featherstone) moved into the home in 1863. John Bousfield owned Cleveland Wooden Ware Manufacturing Company with his business partner J. B. Hervey. The business eventually collapsed and led to the Bousfield's temporarily leaving the company of Franklin’s finest. It is likely that the Bousfields were responsible for the substantial style change to the mansion around 1869. No longer strictly Italianate, the mansion boasted a mansard roof that covered the original belvedere. The mansard roof remains today, essentially blending the Italianate style with Second-Empire influence.  When Bousfield’s woodenware business went under in 1875, he lost everything, including his home. The bank did not actually foreclose on the home until around 1880, but the Bousfields were already plotting their return to Franklin. Because of his social status, John Bousfield was involved with his neighbor’s businesses and had good relationships with Cleveland’s west side elite. Along with prominent names like Coffinberry and Rhodes, he was involved in founding People’s Gas Light Company, of which he later became President. He was also Vice President of the People’s Savings & Loan Association, which later foreclosed his 3105 Franklin home. Luckily, these positions earned him enough money to build a new mansion on the corner of Franklin and West 38th Street, just northeast of his old one. Known as Stone Gables, this new home would be even more grandiose, with seventeen rooms just for the Bousfields. The couple rented out the remaining half of the house, supplementing their income. Stone Gables still stands as a private residence and inn, and it has been painstakingly restored.  The mansion at 3105 Franklin passed through various forfeiture banks until it was purchased by land speculator Cyrus Bosworth, an heir to Leonard Case. It’s unclear if Bosworth purchased the home to live in or intended to resell it, but in 1885 the property was sold to John Pankhurst, a wealthy proprietor of the Globe Iron Works and Globe Ship Building. Pankhurst’s business partners included Henry Coffinberry and Robert Wallace, who also owned homes on Franklin. After Pankhurst died in 1898, his widow sold the home to John M. Leich, president of Star Brewing Company, for $20,000. It was the last time the home was used as a private residence. In 1913 the property changed hands again. However, this time the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) bought it and the neighboring mansion to the east. In 1928, the year before the onset of the Great Depression, YWCA demolished the mansion to the east and constructed a new dormitory complex of two three-story buildings for single working women to rent rooms. The dormitory buildings were designed by the firm of Howell & Thomas. Howell & Thomas was a small firm that designed many homes in the east side suburbs, including eleven demonstration homes for the Van Sweringen brothers. The firm also designed various YWCA buildings throughout Ohio and Texas.  As the residential wealth that built the homes declined, religious institutions such as the YWCA moved in. Even before the Great Depression, much like the wealthy residents of Euclid Avenue, fortunes diminished and large city homes became less desirable. Franklin Boulevard went from a neighborhood of Cleveland’s elite to mainly working-class immigrants who rented out rooms in converted rooming houses. Many formerly elegant homes were overcrowded and unsightly as a result of housing shortages and the economic downturn of the 1930s. This is best exemplified by the decades-old story of a CWA census worker finding more than 80 people living in the old Belden Seymour home. However, unlike Euclid Avenue, the great homes have mostly persevered throughout this period and have survived despite commercial encroachment in the area. The YWCA remained at 3105 Franklin until 1957, when the properties were sold to The Sisters of the Humility of Mary, who operated Our Lady of Lourdes Academy just east of the site at 3307 Franklin, which is now an empty lot. The Sisters of the Humility of Mary, a Roman Catholic congregation, were looking to house sisters teaching at Lourdes Academy in the old YWCA dormitories.  Both the YWCA buildings and the Cook-Bousfield mansion were sold again in 1976, after the Academy had merged. The new owners renovated the properties into an elderly care facility for seniors with mental illnesses. It was at this time that an above-ground tunnel connecting the mansion and the dormitories was added, presumably for ease of access for the workers and patients. The tunnel covered the original front entryway of the Cook-Bousfield mansion, and it is likely that the original ornate wooden doors were removed. According to a Plain Dealer article from 1920, the “double doors of black walnut, with ornate carvings of lion’s heads” came from the studio of John Herkomer, who had a shop at Erie (East 9th) and Eagle Street. Not constructed during the period of historical significance, the tunnel has been demolished. When crews were demolishing the tunnel in 2020, they revealed one of the original side porches of the mansion, which may have been turned into a pantry during its institutional days. Beginning in 2021, the Cook-Bousfield mansion and YWCA dormitory complex were rehabilitated for upscale apartments. There are approximately 38 apartment units throughout the buildings, with an adjoining courtyard. The YWCA complex was gutted and little of the original interior remains. However, due to the project’s tax credit status, the floor plan of the interior is mostly true to the original layout. Many of the historic elements of the Cook-Bousfield mansion, such as the ceilings, flooring, and woodwork, were covered up over time due to its institutional uses. These historic features are rediscovered in the modern setting. The Cook-Bousfield mansion’s conversion into apartments is, simply put, another chapter in its storied life.

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Historic houses are often named after the person for whom they were built, especially when that person happens to have been a prominent member of the community. While this practice may give historic houses a certain cachet, it is not without risk. With the passage of time and changing societal mores, information about that prominent citizen may come to light which tarnishes their image and that cachet. Such is the case with naming the house at 4414 Franklin Boulevard after Mortimer J. Lawrence, a man who in the late nineteenth century built a newspaper empire that was headquartered in Cleveland.

Most, if not all, contemporary biographers of Mortimer J. Lawrence lauded him as they related his rags-to-riches life story. It is a format that was often used by Cleveland biographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when telling the stories of the men who they believed were responsible for building the city into an industrial powerhouse. For M. J. Lawrence, the story went something like this. He grew up in Wakeman, Ohio, just south of Vermillion. His father abandoned him when he was a little boy. He went to work at a young age to help support the family. When the War between the States broke out in 1861, he lied about his age in order to enlist on the side of the North. He served gallantly and, when the war ended, he moved to Cleveland. He married a local girl, Helen Madison, and together they started a family, living at first on Cleveland's east side where their three sons were born. Mortimer worked as a reporter at the Herald for a time and then at the Leader. In 1872, when he was just 29 years old, he decided to take a big risk. He borrowed money to purchase the Ohio Farmer, a struggling agricultural newspaper. Working tirelessly, he saved the paper from bankruptcy. It soon became a successful and profitable paper. He then proceeded to build around it a chain of agricultural newspapers in neighboring states which created a readership for his papers that eventually stretched from the Midwest all the way to the East Coast. Within a decade, the long hours, the hard work, and the risk taken made Lawrence a very wealthy man. That was the rags-to-riches narrative for Mortimer J. Lawrence. But there was more to his life and much of it was far from being praiseworthy.

In March 1882, M. J., as he was known after he became wealthy, purchased a parcel of land on the north side of Franklin Boulevard, just a few lots east of Taylor (West 45th) Street, and arranged for the construction of the house which stands today at 4414 Franklin. Designed in the Queen Anne style by up-and-coming young architect Nevins Charlot, it is two and one-half stories tall and today has more than 5,000 square feet of living area. Once construction was completed in late 1882, M.J., Helen and their three sons, who ranged in age from four to fourteen years, moved into the house. With such a young family, you might expect that the Lawrences would have lived happily in the house for many years to come. However, less than four years later, M.J. sold the house and moved to Denver, Colorado. Before he departed, he told his employees, according to an article that appeared in the Leader on October 17, 1886, that he was leaving Cleveland "on account of his health." This was hardly the true reason for his hasty departure.

Eight months earlier, in February 1886, a series of articles began to appear in Cleveland and other area newspapers regarding the state of the marriage of M. J. Lawrence and his wife Helen. The first reported that, on February 16, Helen Lawrence had filed a petition in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas against M. J., seeking a divorce, alleging that the well-known editor and publisher had committed acts of extreme cruelty against her as well as adultery. Reporters following up on the filing learned from Helen Lawrence's sister that on Saturday evening, February 13, Helen had come to her house on Liberty (West 48th) Street seeking shelter, claiming that M. J. had beaten her. The sister observed that Helen's face was badly bruised. She said that it was common knowledge in the family that M. J. had physically and mentally abused Helen for years, including striking her, spitting on her and throwing hot water in her face. Finally, Helen could take no more of it and had fled from her home. Days after speaking with Helen's sister, a reporter from the Leader learned that Helen Lawrence was staying at the Forest City House on Public Square. He went there and observed for himself the bruises on Helen's face. The Leader also interviewed M. J. Lawrence who told them he would prove his innocence in court.

Helen Lawrence wasn't the only woman in Cleveland in the post-Civil War era who was filing for divorce against an abusive husband. Prompted and pressured by leading feminist activists like Susan B. Anthony , Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others, legislatures and courts across the United States had liberalized the grounds which women could assert in order to obtain a divorce from such husbands. Moreover, the laws regarding alimony had also been liberalized to better enable women to support themselves after they were divorced. As a result, the number of divorces sought by and granted to women in the post-Civil War era skyrocketed, causing legislators and others more interested in preserving the family unit than protecting the rights of battered women to push back against further progressive changes. This then would be the last era to see significant changes in divorce laws that benefited women until the dawn of a new civil rights era for women in the 1960s.

Helen Lawrence was awarded a divorce from M. J. Lawrence in late March 1886, just six weeks after she filed her petition. It turned out that M. J. Lawrence did not prove his innocence in court as he had told newspaper reporters that he would. Instead, he did not contest his wife's entitlement to a divorce and agreed to the court awarding her what in that era would have been considered a substantial alimony settlement. Helen used a portion of that alimony to buy a house on Franklin, just west of Waverly (West 58th) Street, where she raised her youngest son and cared for her aged mother. After he sold the house at 4414 Franklin and moved to Denver, M. J. married the woman--more than 20 years younger than he-- with whom he had been carrying on his extramarital affair. Nearly a decade would pass before he and his new wife would return to and once again live in Cleveland.

After the Lawrence family moved from 4414 Franklin, it became home to several other prominent Clevelanders. One was Herman Baehr, the owner of a prominent local brewery. Best known as the man who defeated Cleveland's legendary mayor Tom Johnson, Baehr resided in the house at 4414 Franklin for a decade, including the period of 1910-1911 when he served as Cleveland's mayor. Another prominent owner was Jacob Laub, who founded Laub Bakery in Cleveland in 1889. Laub Bakery was well known to Clevelanders for nearly a century before it went out of business in 1974. In the 1920s, the house was owned and occupied by a less prominent Clevelander, Gustav Lebozsa, a Hungarian immigrant tailor. After initially occupying it as a single family house, in 1928 he converted it into a rooming house, which it remained, according to Cleveland directory records until at least 1951. In the 1940 census, nine families were listed as residing in the M. J. Lawrence House.

By the mid-twentieth century, the M. J. Lawrence House was in deplorable condition. A photo taken in 1954 for the Cleveland Board of Zoning Appeals revealed that house's third story front dormer was gone; the windows and decorative woodwork on the two front gables had been covered with asphalt shingles; the eaves of the front gables had been removed; several of the house's original five chimneys were missing; and the house's covered front porch was gone. Much, if not all, of this damage was caused by the historic 1953 tornado, which damaged this house and many others on Franklin. In the year following the historic tornado, repairs were completed and the M. J. Lawrence House was converted from a rooming house into a four-suite apartment with two suites on the first floor, and two on the second. The house continued to be so used during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1980s, a new owner was in the process of adding a fifth suite to the third floor of the house, when he abandoned the work and left the house vacant. As the end of 1980s approached, the City of Cleveland was threatening to condemn the M. J. Lawrence House when it was saved by Duane and Michaella Drotar.

According to Duane Drotar, he and his wife were social workers living on West 28th Street in 1989 when they became involved in the controversy surrounding St. Herman's House of Hospitality's application to the City of Cleveland for a zoning variance to add a dining hall onto the house at 4410 Franklin. St. Herman's, which has provided shelter for homeless men at that location on Cleveland's west side since 1977, is located next door to the M. J. Lawrence House. While some in the neighborhood opposed the variance, the Drotars did not. They learned that, if they were to purchase the vacant M. J. Lawrence House and indicate their non-opposition to St. Herman's variance request, the City of Cleveland would likely approve it. So, the Drotars sold their house on West 28th and, with the sales proceeds, purchased the M. J. Lawrence House. They then began what turned out to be a long process to renovate and restore it. (Meanwhile, St. Herman's proposed building addition was approved by the City.)

Duane and Michaella Drotar first renovated the interior of the M. J. Lawrence House during the 1990s, building first a suite for their family that consisted of the entire first floor of the house and part of the second. They next built a separate rental suite on the remaining part of the second floor. Finally, they developed the third floor into a temporary residence for, as Duane Drotar put it, "people in transition." After the interior renovations were completed, the Drotars turned their attention to the exterior of the house. They did not attempt to restore it to its original design primarily because the cost was prohibitive. Instead they renovated the exterior to resemble a "painted lady" Victorian house that one might see in San Francisco. Their external renovations to the house were completed in 2003.

The Drotar family lived in the house at 4414 Franklin for nearly 30 years. During these years, Duane and Michaella's three children grew up in the house, and Duane and Michaella continued their social work of ministering to the needy on Cleveland's west side. While the M. J. Lawrence House may have been built for and first occupied by a newspaper editor who abused his wife, the Drotar family, over the course of their long residency in the house, did much to improve both the appearance and the reputation of the house, if not stigma attaching to its name. The M. J. Lawrence House is now, as a result, known in the Franklin Boulevard neighborhood as a place where innumerable acts of kindness, compassion and charity for neighbors occurred over the course of the decades that the Drotar family lived there.

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In May 1867, a reporter for the Plain Dealer trudged up 70 steps to the top of the Kentucky Street Reservoir on Franklin Avenue (Boulevard) near Kentucky (West 38th) Street. Perhaps after first stopping for a moment to catch his breath, he looked to the south and to the west at the houses he could see from that elevation. Judging the newness of houses by the appearance of their roofs and siding, he concluded that almost every other house within his field of vision was a new one, counting at least 75 of them, he wrote, before giving up. In this way, he was able to confirm one aspect of the incredible growth of Cleveland's west and south sides that had followed the end of the Civil War.

The Plain Dealer reporter wasn't the only person in Cleveland counting new houses on the city's west and south sides around this time. Reverend Lewis Burton, the long-time rector of historic St. John's Episcopal Church, was likely counting them too. By 1869, he had concluded that St. John's needed to expand and seed new Episcopal parishes on Cleveland's burgeoning west and south sides. How to do this, however, challenged him. St. John's had suffered a disastrous fire in April 1866 and its modest parish was still saddled with debt that had been incurred rebuilding after that fire. Burton solved the problem when, in January 1870, he formed a new parish group which he named the "Missionary and Church Extension Association of St. John's Parish" and asked them to help. He soon found that not only had the Association raised enough money to build chapels for the west and south side missions he desired, but it had also in the process reduced the parish's debt. He reported this serendipitous development at the Ohio Episcopal Diocese General Convention in June 1870.

Much of the housing growth which both the rector and the reporter had noted in the 1860s was in residential subdivisions to the north and south of Franklin Avenue, west of Taylor (West 45th) Street. Prominent west side developers Silas S. Stone, Jacob Perkins, George Benedict, and Elias Root had laid out large subdivisions in this area in the 1850s, around the time of Ohio City's annexation to the City of Cleveland. It was in the midst of these large subdivisions that St. John's Episcopal parish in the summer of 1870 sited its west side mission, building a small wooden chapel near the southwest corner of Franklin and Liberty (West 48th) Street. As soon as it was completed, Reverend Burton began holding weekly services in the chapel every Sunday. By 1872 so many were attending those services that a new Episcopalian parish was organized. Burton then resigned as rector of St. John's so that he could be elected the first rector of the new parish, which was named St. Mark's. At about the same time, he and his family moved from their house on Vestry Street, not far from St. John's, to a new house on the lot immediately to the west of where the chapel (now St. Mark's Episcopal church) stood. Burton served as rector of the new parish until his retirement in 1887. Thereafter, he served as rector emeritus until his death in 1894.

It was during the period 1890-1892, under the leadership of Burton's successor, the Reverend Francis Mason Hall, that St. Mark's parish built a new, larger church, the one which still stands on the southwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 48th Street and which is the subject of this story. Made of stone and featuring cathedral windows, the new church was erected just to the north of the original wooden church, which subsequently became a parish meeting hall. The new church was designed by architect H. B. Smith in the English Gothic style, according to an article appearing in the Plain Dealer on September 30, 1890. Perhaps its most significant architectural feature is its 62-foot-tall tower which looms over the corner of Franklin and West 48th. The church has more than 3000 square feet of internal space--almost three times that of the original wooden church--and it was reported to have a seating capacity when built of approximately 400. Church records, local histories, and newspaper articles, suggest that the new, larger church was needed by the parish to accommodate growth. According to available sources, in 1879 the parish had 151 communicants. By 1901, this number reportedly had nearly tripled to 425.

The stone church on the corner of Franklin and West 48th served the St. Mark's parish as a place of worship for nearly a half century before the parish moved out of it in 1940 and into a new church at 15305 Triskett Road in Cleveland's West Park neighborhood. A lack of primary or secondary sources makes it difficult to determine exactly why the parish moved in that year from its long-time Franklin Boulevard location. However, a review of Cleveland necrology records from the period 1870-1940 suggests that, by the third decade of the twentieth century, many of the church's parishioners had moved from the near west side to either the far west side or to west side suburbs of Cleveland, especially Lakewood. Thus, it is possible that the church moved west simply to be located in closer geographical proximity to a majority of its parishioners. In addition, the number of parishioners may have declined, rendering the church on Franklin Boulevard too large for a dwindling, distant parish population. St. Mark's new church on Triskett Road was smaller and had, according to newspaper accounts, seating for only 160 people.

After the departure of St. Mark's parish, the stone church on Franklin Boulevard stood vacant for a number of years. The original wooden church on the property, however, continued to serve a purpose within the Ohio Episcopal Diocese, becoming home to St. Agnes Episcopal Church for the Deaf from 1940 to 1953. In March 1953, according to an article appearing in the Plain Dealer on July 4th of that year, the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio sold the former St. Mark's church property to the First United Pentecostal Church. The article noted that the new congregation had been in the process of renovating and remodeling the stone church when it was damaged during the historic June 8, 1953 tornado which caused extensive damage to many buildings on the west side of Cleveland. It is not clear from the article whether the damage to the church included its tower and/or whether the 1953 renovation of the church included covering much of the tower with the red siding emblazoned with a large cross still seen on it today. The covering of the tower, however, was done by the Pentecostal Church at some point in time before the summer of 1970, when sketches of the church in ads appearing in the Plain Dealer clearly showed the tower already covered.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, the former St. Mark's Episcopal church at the corner of Franklin and West 48th was home to several other Christian denominations, including the Foursquare Gospel Church (1972-1981), Calvary Christian Center (1986-1992), and God is Love (1992-1995). In 1995, it became home to a Hispanic Evangelical congregation known as Iglesia del Salvador, which it remains to this day.

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The next time you find yourself driving down historic Franklin Boulevard between Franklin Circle and West 50th Street, take time to notice what is different about the stretch of the Boulevard between West 32nd and West 38th Streets. It is entirely devoid of any grand houses--nineteenth century or otherwise. Relevant to this story, on the south side of that stretch just west of the Fairview Gardens Apartments, you'll see a large community garden that extends all the way to West 38th Street. You might imagine that at one time grand mansions graced this section of Franklin Boulevard, too. If you did, however, you'd be wrong, because this is instead where the now legendary Kentucky Street Reservoir once stood.

The Kentucky Street Reservoir was part of the City of Cleveland's first water works system. In March 1850, Cleveland Mayor William Case, in his inaugural address, noted Cleveland's extraordinary population growth in the preceding decade--from 6,000 in 1840 to 17,000 in 1850, an increase of 180.6%--and challenged City Council to address, among other things, the issue of providing a sufficient supply of "pure water" for this growing population. At the time, all of Cleveland's drinking water came from springs and wells. Water for other purposes, such as cleaning, was hauled in barrels up Superior Hill from the Cuyahoga River. Council took up the challenge and appointed a committee to study the matter. Over the course of the next two years, the committee examined the City's water needs, talked with experts both in the United States and Europe, and observed the operations of the water works systems in a number of large cities, including Cincinnati, then the nation's sixth largest with a population of more than 115,000 residents.

In a report delivered to the Mayor and Council in November 1852, the committee detailed its recommendations for the construction of a water works system that would provide, at least for the next decade, water for all of the city's needs, including sufficient pure drinking water for its burgeoning population, water for cleaning, water for "sprinkling" streets, and water for fighting fires. The committee also recommended that the Council hire Theodore Scowden, the engineer who had designed Cincinnati's water works system, to design Cleveland's new system. It appears Council quickly followed that recommendation, because, within a week, Scowden was, according to local news accounts, already at work as the Engineer for the City's Water Works Board. One year later in October 1853, after the State Legislature had in March authorized the project and the Cleveland electorate had in April approved its financing, Scowden submitted a report to City Council with his recommendations for the various component parts of the new Cleveland water works system including a reservoir.

While Council's committee in 1852 had recommended that the reservoir for the new water works system be a masonry tower with an iron tank capable of holding one millions gallons of water, and that it be constructed on land near the intersection of Frontier (East 21st) Street and Euclid Avenue, Scowden instead recommended an earthen reservoir with a capacity of six million gallons, and that it be built not in Cleveland but across the Cuyahoga River in Ohio City. The site he recommended was a six-acre parcel of land located (north and south) between Franklin (Boulevard) and Woodbine (Avenue) Streets , and (east and west) between Duane (West 32nd) and Kentucky (West 38th) Streets. Scowden's reservoir recommendation appears to have been based on advice the City had received from local engineer George W. Smith, who was familiar with Cleveland's unique topography. According to newspaper accounts, Smith informed City officials that the higher elevation of the Ohio City site--it was 31 feet higher above the surface of Lake Erie than sites considered on the east side of the River--made it not only a safer engineering choice, but also a more cost effective one. While some had reservations over building the reservoir for the new water works system in another city, Council--perhaps anticipating that Ohio City would soon be annexed by Cleveland--approved Scowden's recommendations in a 6-2 vote on October 12, 1853.

The Cleveland water works system designed by Theodore Scowden was constructed during the period 1854-1856. Its main components were an aqueduct located out in Lake Erie, 300 feet from shore and 400 feet west of the western terminus of the Old River Bed; an engine house on Old River Street (Division Avenue) near Kentucky Street, which featured two massive engines for pumping; the Kentucky Street Reservoir; and some 70,150 feet (13 plus miles) of pipeline on the east and west sides of the City, which, effective June 5, 1854, included the territory of the now annexed Ohio City. The total cost of the project was $500,000. During the construction of the water works system and in anticipation of the Ohio State Fair to be held in Cleveland in September 1856, the City also constructed a large stone fountain, 40 feet in diameter, at the center of Public Square. The fountain was fed water through a series of pipes that led from the Reservoir, down the hill to the Flats, then under the Cuyahoga River, and up Superior Avenue to the Square. The water works system was completed just before the Fair opened and the Public Square fountain, with its pure drinking water and its bursts of water some 30 to 50 feet into the air, became a big hit with visitors to the Fair.

The Kentucky Street Reservoir quickly became one of the most recognizable landmarks on the west side of Cleveland. It covered approximately four acres of the six-acre site upon which it was constructed and was built on a sloped 21-foot high, trapezoid-shaped embankment of sand and earth that at its base was 332 feet wide and 466 feet long. Atop this embankment was a 25-foot-high retention basin which was 100 feet wide at its base and 15 feet wide at the top. The exterior of both the retention basin and the embankment was covered with sod. At the top of the Reservoir--46 feet above the grade of nearby Franklin Street--was an eight-foot-wide gravel walk that encircled the basin and that was reached by ascending a flight of 70 steps on the Reservoir's north face. On the inside of the gravel walk-- known as the Promenade Walk--there was a wooden fence which enclosed the basin. A fountain in the basin jetted water into the air. The Reservoir's Promenade Walk, which at the time had the highest elevation of any man-made structure in the City, treated visitors to what people said was the best view of Cleveland and its surroundings. The Reservoir grounds themselves were beautifully landscaped with walks, shade trees and shrubbery.

The Kentucky Reservoir served as an important part of the Cleveland water works system for thirty years. It was abandoned as a reservoir in 1886 after completion of the new much larger Fairmount (80 million gallon) and the High Service (Kinsman - 20 million gallon) reservoirs on the City's east side. For a decade, the fate of the Kentucky Street Reservoir, unused and, according to neighbors, an eyesore and nuisance in the Franklin Avenue neighborhood, was uncertain. Some officials wanted to dismantle it and sell the property to a residential developer, but City lawyers warned that this could cause the land to revert to the heirs of its previous owner, Benjamin F. Tyler, from whom it had been appropriated for public purposes in 1854. Others wanted to preserve it as a storage facility for the Water Works Department.

Finally, in 1897, the City decided to convert the old Reservoir into a city park after receiving a petition from the Western Improvement Association (WIA), an organization of west and south side residents formed in 1894 to advocate for public improvements to their neighborhoods. (WIA member Horace Hannum who led the drive was the owner of the Sarah Bousfield House which was located diagonally across Franklin from the Reservoir property.) Over the course of the next year, the Reservoir was razed, and dirt, sand and other materials from it were used to create a terraced park in its place. The new city park, which opened in April 1898, was dubbed "Fairview," because from its terraced hills visitors could get a "fair view" of Lake Erie. While the name stuck, its "fair views" were lost to park visitors after 1912 when the City flattened the hills and trucked away much of the dirt, sand and other materials for use in the construction of Edgewater Boulevard. In 1917, when World War I was creating much anti-German sentiment in the city, German Hospital located next door to the park was renamed Fairview Park Hospital, the name it is still known by, even though in 1955 it moved to its present day location on Lorain Avenue in the Kamms Corner neighborhood of Cleveland.

In the 1930s, Fairview Park was extensively redeveloped during the administration of Mayor Harold Burton. A playground and wading pool for children--many undoubtedly students attending nearby Kentucky Elementary School--were added in 1938. Walking paths and a baseball diamond were also added to the park during this period. A section of the park was also set aside during this period as a vegetable garden which was tilled for decades by school children under a Cleveland public schools agricultural program. In the 1980s, this school garden became a community garden for residents of the Ohio City neighborhood. Today, the former site of the once famous Kentucky Street Reservoir is home to both the community garden known as Kentucky Gardens, located on the northern part of the old Reservoir property, while what is left of the original Fairview Park now occupies only the southern part of the historic site.

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If you spend a little bit of time studying the history of the houses that line both sides of Franklin Boulevard from the Circle to West 50th Street, you soon learn that they do not stand alone and apart from one another. They are related to one another – many of them intimately. Over time, these houses have shared owners and occupants; fraternal societies and charitable organizations; architects and architectural styles. They have often also shared ties to early Cleveland enterprises and industries. This is certainly the case with Wallace Manor, which has stood on the northeast corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 48th Street since 1883.

Wallace Manor was built for Robert Wallace, one of three individuals whom Cleveland journalists and historians have credited with the transformation and modernization of the Great Lakes commercial shipbuilding industry in the late nineteenth century. The other two? They also were residents of Franklin Boulevard. Wallace's long-time partner Henry Coffinberry lived in a Gothic Revival style house at 3910 Franklin Boulevard, which, like Wallace Manor, is still standing today. And Wallace's other early partner, John Pankhurst, lived in a beautiful Italianate-style house at 3117 Franklin Boulevard. John Pankhurst's house, like those of Robert Wallace and Henry Coffinberry, is still standing. On your next drive down Franklin Boulevard, you might want to take note of the houses at 3117, 3910, and 4724 Franklin Boulevard. They share a connection to each other and to Cleveland's once great shipbuilding industry.

Robert Wallace was born in 1834 in County Cavan, Northern Ireland. According to Elroy McKendree Avery, an early twentieth-century Cleveland historian, Wallace immigrated to the United States and arrived in Cleveland in 1854. In the eulogy he delivered at a memorial service for Wallace on May 28, 1911, Rev. Henry Tenney, a Congregationalist minister who had been Wallace's pastor, observed that, when Wallace came to Cleveland, he settled on the City's west side because that was where his uncle, Robert Sanderson lived and worked. (Sanderson was a machinist and later principal owner of Globe Iron Works, an historic iron foundry on the West Bank of the Flats.) A listing in the 1856 Cleveland directory is the first record of Wallace's presence here. It states that he was then living on Clinton Avenue and working as a machinist. His name, however, does not appear again in any Cleveland directory until 1865 when he is this time listed as an engineer.

It may be, as suggested in Rev. Tenney's eulogy, that Wallace spent some, if not all, of those intervening years as a sailor traveling the Great Lakes aboard commercial ships. By the time that the 1866 directory was published the following year, Wallace appears to have set down firm business roots in Cleveland as he and his partner John Pankhurst are listed as the owners of a small machine shop in Cleveland Centre at the corner of Center and Columbus Streets. A year after that, in 1867, according to historian Richard J. Wright in his book "Freshwater Whales: a History of the American Ship Building Company and its Predecessors," Wallace developed a portable steam engine for unloading cargo from commercial ships which dramatically improved the unloading process. It also proved extremely profitable for Wallace's machine shop.

Within two years of his development of the portable steam engine for unloading , Wallace, Pankhurst, and their new partner Henry Coffinberry had accumulated sufficient capital to acquire a controlling interest in Globe Iron Works, from which Robert Sanderson had recently retired. The company had for years been producing steam engines and other iron products for Great Lakes commercial ships. Now, under Robert Wallace's leadership, Globe Iron Works expanded its business. In 1876, it purchased an interest in a nearby dry dock and, under the name Globe Ship Building Company, began building ships. Up until this time, the process of building Great Lakes commercial ships had required the involvement and coordination of several different industries which manufactured different vessel parts at different locations. Robert Wallace, according to historian Wright, changed this industrial process in 1881 when Globe Ship Building built a commercial ship, from start to finish, entirely at its shipyard. Just one year later, in 1882, the company built and launched the Onoko, the first large iron commercial ship to sail the Great Lakes. This ship has been recognized by marine historians as the prototype for all the commercial freighters that sail the Great Lakes today.

By the time the Onoko was launched in 1882, Globe Iron Works and Globe Ship Building Company had become successful and profitable enterprises. It was at about this time that Robert Wallace and his second wife Fanny – his first wife Lydia had died in 1878 – decided to move from their modest house at 129 (today, 3405) Clinton Avenue onto Franklin Avenue (Boulevard), the West Side's version of nineteenth-century Euclid Avenue's Millionaires' Row. In early 1883, Wallace purchased a vacant lot on the northeast corner of Liberty (West 48th) Street and Franklin Avenue that was owned by and located next door to the house of Alanson and Harriet Hopkinson. Alanson, also known as A. G., was the retired first principal of Cleveland's West High School. He was well known to Wallace as both were members of the First Congregational Church, and both had served as trustees of the church. In the early 1880s both were also actively involved in the planning and building of a new church for their parish on the southeast corner of Taylor (West 45th) Street and Franklin Avenue. The new stone church for the First Congregational Church – West Side, designed by Coburn and Barnum and dedicated by Rev. Tenney on December 20, 1885, was located just a few blocks east of the Hopkinson property upon which Wallace built his new stone house in 1883. While both the First Congregational Church and A. G. Hopkinson's house are no longer standing, they present yet another example of the intimate historical relationships that the houses and other buildings on Franklin Boulevard, in this instance one still standing and the others not, often had with one another.

Wallace Manor is, according to local architectural historian Craig Bobby, built in the Queen Anne style. While the identity of the architect who, or architectural firm which, designed the house is unknown, it may have been the firm of Coburn and Barnum, which designed the Spitzer-Dempsey House at 2830 Franklin and the Sarah Bousfield House at 3804-06 Franklin. In the early 1880s, Forrest Coburn was living at 86 Root (1901 West 47th) Street, less than one-half mile from the future site of Wallace Manor. He was also, like Robert Wallace, a member of the First Congregational Church. As a principal of the architectural firm that designed the new First Congregational church, he likely would have interacted with Wallace who, as a trustee, was also deeply involved in planning and building that church. However, according to Bobby, in the absence of documentation that the house was designed by this firm, there is nothing in the design of the house itself which either proves or disproves that it was the work of Coburn and Barnum. 

Designed as a single family home, Wallace Manor is two and one-half stories tall and has an exterior facade built of sandstone. The expanse of sandstone on the front facade is broken up by at least one belt course of smoothed stones located just below the second floor windows, and the front facade, as well as the expanses of the other exterior walls of the house, are further broken up by stone lintels and hoods around the house's windows. The house has asymmetrical massing with the west side of the front facade extending out beyond the rest of the facade. The roof of the house is hipped and features a number of dormers and three tall stone chimneys. The front of the house has two notable arched windows on the first floor. Also notable is the house's one-story columned porch which extends along the entire length of the eastern part of the front facade.  Located at the rear of the property is another stone building that once likely served as a carriage house. Over its front door on West 48th Street are the initials "RW" carved in stone. The structure, which is depicted on the 1896 Sanborn map, was likely built at the same time as the main house.

The Robert Wallace family, including for a time his oldest son James, a future president of the American Ship Building Company, lived in Wallace Manor until 1895. In that year they moved, like other wealthy Franklin Boulevard families of that time period, to the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, where they built a house on Detroit Avenue, west of Nicholson Avenue. That house, which is no longer standing, was located on what today is the campus of St. Edward Catholic High School. After the Wallace family departed from Wallace Manor, the house was home to several middle to upper economic class families, including a general manager of the Cleveland Railway, the president of Citizens Savings and Trust Company, and a physician, before it was sold and converted into a rooming house in about 1920. In 1923, the property was acquired by Hungarian immigrants Julius and Elizabeth Rak, who lived in the house and continued to operate it as a rooming house until their deaths in 1943. By 1930, the carriage house on the property had been converted into a dwelling with a street address of 1453 West 48th Street and was occupied by two families. By 1940, there were seven families (including the Rak family) with a total of 21 people living in Wallace Manor and five families with a total of 9 people living in the carriage house.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Wallace Manor, like many of the other once grand houses on Franklin Boulevard, was suffering from insufficient maintenance and repair. Photos reveal that, by the 1980s, it was in a deteriorated condition. Most notable was that its once grand front porch had at some time between 1961 and 1986 been razed and replaced with a simple entranceway porch. Like any number of the grand houses on Franklin Boulevard that needed a savior in the late twentieth century, Wallace Manor found one when it was purchased in 1997 by Scott Staley and David Castro. Staley, who is the sole owner of the house today (2021), spent the next 17 years slowly restoring and renovating Wallace Manor. Living in the owner's suite at Wallace Manor, he has also, for the last five years, operated a bed and breakfast in the house which has rooms for guest stays. The carriage house at the rear of the property has also been renovated and today functions as a two-family dwelling. In 2019, descendants of Robert Wallace paid a visit to Wallace Manor, touring the house, snapping pictures, and imagining their ancestors walking from room to room. They too, like their ancestors who once lived there, now share a special relationship with not only those ancestors, but also with Wallace Manor and with historic Franklin Boulevard.

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The house at 3910 Franklin Boulevard, which today is largely hidden from view by its owner's lush and exotic landscaping, is known as the Henry Coffinberry House. It was built for Henry Darling Coffinberry, one of Cleveland's shipbuilding industry giants of the late nineteenth century. Along with partners Robert Wallace and John F. Pankhurst, he was instrumental in modernizing the Great Lakes shipbuilding industry and building both the first iron and the first steel large commercial freighters to sail on the Great Lakes. His efforts made Cleveland, for a time, the largest shipbuilding center in the United States. Think of Henry Coffinberry the next time you see an ore carrier streaming across Lake Erie.

Henry Darling Coffinberry was born in Maumee, Ohio, on October 12, 1841. In 1855, when he was 14 years old, his father James, a lawyer who later became a Common Pleas Court judge, moved the family to Cleveland, purchasing a house on Franklin Boulevard that was located on the present day site of the former West Side Masonic Temple building. According to biographers, Henry attended classes at and graduated from West High School, although records from the school do not show him graduating. In 1862, with the Civil War raging, Henry joined the United States Navy, reaching the rank of "Acting Master" and serving until shortly after the War's end in 1865. Returning to Cleveland, he tried his hand at several jobs before buying an interest in a small machine shop owned by fellow west siders Robert Wallace, John Pankhurst and a third individual, Arthur Sawtell, who soon departed from the business. In 1869, the three surviving partners purchased a controlling interest in Globe Iron Works, an iron foundry started in 1853 by a partnership that included Samuel Lord, the brother of Ohio City pioneer real estate developer and mayor Richard Lord. The original foundry was located in the West Bank of the Flats at the northwest corner of Elm Street and Spruce Avenue--no more than a mile or so away from where Henry lived on Franklin Boulevard. After the foundry was destroyed in a fire in January 1872, Henry and his partners built a new foundry--still standing today--on the southwest corner of that intersection.

Henry Coffinberry was living at his parents house in 1869 when he and his partners acquired their interest in Globe Iron Works.  He continued to reside with his parents until 1875, the year he married Harriet Morgan, the daughter of Civil War General George W. Morgan.  In August 1874, just eight months before his wedding, Coffinberry purchased a house up the street on the north side of Franklin Avenue, several lots west of Kentucky (West 38th) Street. According to local architectural historian Craig Bobby, Coffinberry either razed or moved that house and, in 1875, built in its place the house that today stands at 3910 Franklin Boulevard. Designed in the Gothic Revival style with cross gables, the two-story house has a prominent central gable that has an extension at what had been the original center of the front facade, which incorporates a vestibule and a large, decorative gable above. Two second-floor windows have Gothic detailing and its gables have decorated vergeboards. There is a one story entry porch at its front door.  The house also has an addition that was constructed onto its east side in 1895. The addition has a front door which for many years also had an entry porch.  Local historian Bobby observed that the house was built in the later years of the Gothic Revival period here in the United States. As a result, it has some features that were influenced by the then more prevalent Italianate style, such as, for example, the elaborate hoods over some of its windows.

According to Cleveland directories, Henry and Harriet Coffinberry did not move into their new house until more than a year after their marriage--sometime in late 1876 or early 1877. (This may have been because they lived with Henry parents during the first year of their marriage, possibly to help care for the latter who had suffered severe injuries in a collision between their carriage and a train near the Union Depot Station while returning home from their son's wedding.) Henry and Harriet, along with their daughters Nadine and Maria, resided in the house at 3910 Franklin until 1891, when the family moved from the house. The fifteen or so years during which Henry Coffinberry lived there corresponded with the most productive years of his business career. In 1876, Globe Iron Works started a new business called Globe Ship Building Company and began producing wooden ships. Henry Coffinberry was tapped by the partners to serve as president of the new business. Five years later in 1881, under his direction, the company built the Onoko, which, when launched in February 1882, became the first large commercial ship built of iron to sail the Great Lakes. By 1883, Globe had built a large shipyard on W. Old River Street (Division Avenue) near its intersection with St. Paul (West 49th) Street, not far from the west end of the Ship Canal. In 1886, the company built and launched at its shipyard the Spokane, the first steel freighter to sail the Great Lakes. Globe Iron's iron and steel ships were prototypes for all the modern freighters that sail the Great Lakes today.

Just a month after the launch of the Spokane in 1886, a dispute within the partnership led to Coffinberry and Wallace's departure from Globe Iron Works and, several months later, their formation of a new company – Cleveland Shipbuilding Co. – which was financially backed by a number of prominent east and west side industrialists, including J. H. Wade, Jr., William Chisolm, M. A. Bradley, Robert Russell Rhodes, and George Warmington. As he had at Globe Ship Building, Coffinberry headed the new company as its president. Cleveland Shipbuilding successfully competed with Globe Ship Building, with both businesses contributing to make Cleveland the leading shipbuilding center in the United States by 1890. Coffinberry retired from the shipbuilding business in 1894. Five years later in 1899, Cleveland Shipbuilding, Globe Iron Works, Ship Owners' Dry Dock Company, and several out-of-town businesses consolidated to form the American Shipbuilding Company, one of Cleveland's great industrial enterprises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, according to environmental historian David Stradling and his brother Richard Stradling in their book "Where the River Burned."

After moving out of the house at 3910 Franklin Boulevard in 1891, the Coffinberry family continued to own it and leased it to renters. As noted above, they constructed an addition onto the house in 1895 and converted it into a two-family residence, which, after 1905, had the addresses of 3910 and 3912 Franklin Boulevard. The house remained in the Coffinberry family until 1918 when it was sold by Henry Coffinberry's widow and daughters. The Coffinberry House thereafter passed through the hands of several short-term owners before it was acquired by Ernest and Mary Toth in 1926. Ernest, a carpenter by trade, and his wife Mary, were Hungarian immigrants, as were many residents of Franklin Boulevard during this period. The Toths initially leased it to renters, but from the mid 1930s until the mid 1950s they lived in the east side of the house, renting out only the west side. Photographs of the house taken while it was occupied by the Toth family show that it was well-maintained during this period. The Toths moved to the suburbs in the mid-1950s, and thereafter leased both sides of the Coffinberry House to renters. Mary Toth sold the house in 1963 shortly after the death of her husband. In the several decades that followed, the condition of the house declined until 1982 when it was acquired by Mark Pokrandt who restored and renovated the house. As of 2021, the Henry Coffinberry House is still owned by Pokrandt.

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The large stone house on the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 38th Street was built in 1883-1884 for John and Sarah Bousfield. It was designed by the prominent nineteenth century architectural firm of Coburn and Barnum, the same firm that designed the Spitzer-Dempsey House at 2830 Franklin Boulevard. The house, which today has the address of 3804-3806 Franklin, was designed to be a two-family home with the Bousfields occupying the larger east side, which was advertised as having 17 rooms, and a renter occupying the west side which was said to have 13 rooms. The house is two and one half stories tall and has more than 12,000 square feet of living space. It also has a full basement with ground level access from the back yard. The house was designed in the Queen Anne style, with characteristic asymmetrical massing, half-timbered gables, and what local architectural historian Craig Bobby referred to as "robust" spindlework. Bobby also opined that the design of the house is closer to the English example of this style of house and less "Americanized" than other Queen Anne style houses built in Cleveland in the late nineteenth century.

John Bousfield and Sarah Featherstone, the house's original owners, were English immigrants who came to America in the early 1840s. They met in Kirtland, Ohio, and married there in 1845. After having little success in trying his hand at farming, John purchased a small wooden ware business and began manufacturing wooden pails, first in Kirtland and then in nearby Fairport (today, Fairport Harbor). Looking for a better location for his business, he moved his family to Cleveland in 1855. His early years working and residing in the city were filled with a mixture of small successes and several business reverses, the latter often caused by fires that appear to have been altogether too common in the nineteenth century wooden ware manufacturing industry. However, by the early 1860s, he and his business partner J. B. Hervey had established a large and successful business, known as Cleveland Wooden Ware Manufacturing Company, in Cleveland Centre, near the intersection of Leonard and Voltaire Streets. After Hervey retired from the business in 1866, Bousfield and his new partner John Poole had even greater success initially, growing the business into what several contemporary sources stated was the largest wooden ware business in the country. By this time, the company was manufacturing not only wooden pails, but also many other wooden products used in that era, including churns, half-tubs, washboards, clothes pins, dressed lumber, shingles, mouldings, and matches.

Befitting John Bousfield's business success, the Bousfield family in 1863 moved from a house on Pearl (West 25th) Street into their first house on Franklin Avenue (Boulevard), a grand mansion built in the Italianate style and located on the southeast corner of Franklin and Duane (West 32nd) Street. To their east lived William Castle, former mayor of Cleveland, and to the west their house was just a stone's throw away from the Kentucky Street Reservoir and its legendary promenade walk. (Diagonally across Franklin on the corner of State Street they may have noticed the little girl who tended to her flower garden and often played with Mayor Castle's daughter. She would grow up to become Ella Grant Wilson, one of Cleveland's pioneer feminists.) Living on Franklin Avenue, the Bousfields interacted socially with many of the west side's wealthiest families, including those of Daniel Rhodes, John Sargent, Nelson Sanford, Belden Seymour, Thomas Axworthy, Judge James Coffinberry and his son Henry, and George Warmington, just to name a few. One such interaction, which was described in an article that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on January 8, 1870, was the party the Bousfields threw for their 25th wedding anniversary, where their "spacious mansion . . .on Franklin Street . . . was thronged with guests." Interactions like these were not only "social," but often also presented opportunities for neighbors on the west side's "Euclid Avenue" to form new or cement old business relationships with each other. John Bousfield was involved in several such business relationships with his neighbors. In 1866, he and neighbors Daniel Rhodes, Nelson Sanford, John Sargent, James Coffinberry, and others, had founded the People's Gas Light Company, which Bousfield later headed as president. Three years later, in 1869, he participated in the formation of the People's Saving and Loan Association, serving for the next six years as one of the bank's two vice presidents under president Daniel Rhodes. Despite all of his neighborhood social and business successes, however, the economic depression in the United States that followed the Panic of 1873 may have been too much to overcome. John Bousfield's wooden ware business in Cleveland Centre collapsed in 1875 and he was left bankrupt, losing not only his business assets to creditors but, in 1880, his grand house on Franklin Avenue too.

After his business failed in 1875 and he lost his house on Franklin Boulevard, John Bousfield started a new wooden ware manufacturing business at a different location on the west side with help from his adult children, including his daughter Charlotte who lived with him and Sarah, but it was plagued by fire, lawsuits and other problems. By 1881 it had closed and its business operations had been transferred to his adult sons' wooden ware manufacturing facility in Bay City, Michigan. Between 1880 and 1883, the Bousfields rented a house on nearby Clinton Avenue--literally within sight of their former mansion--while they strove to satisfy creditors and plan their return to Franklin Avenue. While there, they purchased another house on the northwest corner of Franklin and Kentucky (West 38th) Street in 1881. They rented that house out until 1883, when they either razed it or moved it to make room for the large stone mansion designed by Coburn and Barnum that was subsequently built on the corner. In the same year that the stone house was completed, the Bousfields began renting out rooms in a second house on the property that fronted Kentucky Street. (This house may have been all or part of the house that formerly sat on the corner of Franklin and Kentucky; it may have been new construction; or it may have been a house that was moved from another location.) With two houses on their lot, the Bousfields were not only able to generate rental income from the west side of the stone mansion, but also from the second house too. While there exists little evidence of the financial status of John and Sarah Bousfield during this period, the rental income from these properties may well have been critical to their survival in what were the later years of their lives. John Bousfield died at the house in 1888; his wife Sarah died there six years later in 1894.

Following their deaths, Horace Hannum who lived up the street and who married Charlotte Bousfield just months after her mother's death, took over the management of the Sarah Bousfield House as well as the other house on the property. Hannum maintained the west side of the Sarah Bousfield House as a single-family unit, moving into it with Charlotte in 1898 and living there until his death in 1908. The larger east side of the house, however, was by 1900 operating as a rooming house. Shortly after Horace's death, Charlotte and the other heirs of Sarah Bousfield sold the property in 1910 to Juno Robeson, a social worker who had moved to Cleveland ten years earlier from Paducah, Kentucky. Robeson converted the entire stone mansion into a rooming house for businesswomen. It may have been during her ownership (1910-1923) that physical alterations were made to the house to provide access from one side of the house to the other. Robeson's Business Inn for Women does not appear to have survived for more than a couple of years. Thereafter the stone mansion, as well as the other house on the property, like many other large houses on Franklin Boulevard in the twentieth century, became rooming houses, first managed during Robeson's ownership, and then later directly owned, by Frank and Clara Bennett. By 1925, the stone mansion was being advertised for lease as a rooming house with 38 rooms. Both houses on the property remained rooming houses for much of the rest of the twentieth century. In 1945, the lot upon which the two houses sat was split and the houses were thereafter under different ownership. While it is unclear exactly when, at some point in time after 1966 the other house was razed. The resulting vacant lot afterwards became property of the city of Cleveland which, in 1983, sold it to the Franklin Boulevard Nursing Home, located across West 38th Street from the Sarah Bousfield House.

And thus the stone mansion continued to sit on the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 38th Street, continued to be used as a rooming house, and continued to deteriorate until 1994, when James Hauer and Richard Turnbull purchased it at a sheriff's sale. The two men had since 1988 owned and lived in a house up the street at 3901 Franklin Boulevard. Turnbull, an art historian, wanted to restore and renovate the house, redividing it into its original two-family configuration, with four apartment suites on the east side of the house and a five-room bed-and-breakfast on the west side. After hiring Cleveland architect John Rakauskas, obtaining city approval for their plan, and providing financial incentive for their roomers to vacate the house, Hauer and Turnbull began restoring and renovating it in 1999. (That same year, they also purchased the vacant lot owned by the nursing home in order to provide parking for tenants and guests.) Turnbull conducted extensive research in the restoration effort. He located a 1905 photo of the house to guide his restoration of its exterior. Decades of paint were hand-scraped off the house to get down to the original colors. The front porch was restored with its original columns carefully replicated. In the interior of the house, walls that had been put up to create the rooming house were removed, and the original rooms, to the greatest extent possible, were restored, even down to moldings and picture rails. (During the renovation, Turnbull was able to debunk a legend told to him by a former roomer that in the 1950s money from a bank robbery had been hidden somewhere in the house under a floorboard. Roomers believing the legend had cut through many of the house's floorboards, sometimes even switching rooms to cut through more. If the money had ever been in the house, it was long gone before Trumbull did his extensive renovation.) The total cost of the renovations and restoration was $650,000. The majority of the work was completed in 2001, when Stone Gables, a bed-and-breakfast that was advertised as a safe place for gay visitors to stay in Cleveland, opened. Remaining work on the house continued for two more years before the renovation and restoration was complete. Hauer and Turnbull operated the bed-and-breakfast and rented out the apartments in the house until 2017, when they sold the house. As of 2021, its new owners continue to operate the Sarah Bousfield House--still also known as Stone Gables--as Hauer and Trumbull had.

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The origins of the building at 3200 Franklin Boulevard, which today is home to a condominium development known as "Franklin Lofts," may be said to go back to May 7, 1898, and the sudden death of W. A. Ingham, a prominent Cleveland bookseller and publisher. Ingham's business had sustained a severe and unexpected loss in 1889 from which neither it nor he fully recovered, and, when he died, Ingham left his widow in a precarious financial condition. According to her late husband's will, she had two options. She could continue to live in their grand Italianate style house on the northwest corner of Franklin Avenue and Duane (West 32nd) Street, or she could sell the house and receive a lump sum of money from the estate. The widow in question was Mary B. Ingham (also known as Mary Bigelow Ingham), a Cleveland pioneer feminist, a charter member of the national Women's Christian Temperance Union, a co-founder of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an author of numerous articles and books about the lives of nineteenth century women. She decided to stay in the house for the next two years while her husband's estate was being probated, taking in roomers to help pay the bills. As the estate proceedings drew to a close, she elected to have the house sold and, in the Fall of 1900, she moved out, taking up residence on the campus of Oberlin College. There, she continued to write and publish and, undoubtedly, continued to influence yet another generation of American women.

W.A. Ingham's death in 1898, and the decision of Mary B. Ingham to move out of their house in 1900, paved the way for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) to establish a branch facility on the west side of Cleveland. Since 1895, the Cleveland YMCA had been looking for an opportunity to do so. In 1897, it had mounted a campaign to establish a location, but, according to the March 18, 1900, edition of the Plain Dealer, it had failed for lack of support. When, in 1900, it came to the attention of a young men's club at the Franklin Avenue Methodist-Episcopal Church, located on the southwest corner of Franklin Avenue and Duane Street that the Ingham House, just across the street, was for sale, they mounted their own campaign to have it become the new west side YMCA. Prominent west side business men joined the effort. Robert Wallace, the recently retired president of the Cleveland Shipbuilding Company, and as well a long-time resident of Franklin Boulevard, purchased the Ingham house and donated it to the YMCA. Others contributed the money necessary to construct a gymnasium addition onto the rear of the house. On November 5, 1901, the new West Side YMCA, which was initially called the West Side Boys Club, opened. Not only was it Cleveland's first YMCA branch located on the city's west side, but it was also, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, the first YMCA in the United States whose membership was restricted to boys between the ages of 12 and 18.

The person who was tapped to head the new West Side YMCA was Mathew D. Crackel, Secretary of the Junior Department of the Central YMCA since 1897. Crackel, who had been living in downtown Cleveland, immediately moved to Franklin Boulevard, the street on which, except for a two-year stay in Jerusalem in the 1930s where he established a YMCA for Jewish and Palestinian boys, he would live for the rest of his life. Crackel was known for his moral compass, his motivational speeches and his extended hiking and camping trips. The most memorable of the latter were his annual "gypsy trips," which began in 1902. Each year, Crackel led a group of YMCA boys on long hikes that often covered hundreds of miles, and involved camping outdoors for weeks, before returning to Cleveland. Crackel also headed the first Boy Scout troop in Cleveland, which was formed at the West Side YMCA in 1910. He served as Secretary of the West Side YMCA until his retirement in 1933.

It was during Mathew Crackel's tenure as head of the West Side YMCA that the building which currently sits on the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 32nd Street was erected. In 1909, the Cleveland YMCA had decided to expand its membership by constructing new and larger facilities for its Central YMCA on Prospect Avenue as well as for its East End and West Side branches. The new West Side YMCA facility was to be built at the same general location as the existing facility. The lot on Franklin immediately to the west of the Ingham House was purchased and the house on it razed. The Ingham house was razed as well and the gymnasium, which had been attached to the rear of it, was moved to the rear of the lot to the west. The new building was erected on and straddled both of the lots. It was designed by architect Albert Skeel, an English immigrant who trained in Cleveland at the offices of the well-known architect Frank Barnum. Four stories in height, including its basement which held the lobby and served as the building's "ground" floor, it had 120 feet of frontage on Franklin Boulevard and an equal amount on West 32nd Street. It was equipped with a gymnasium (giving this branch two gymnasiums), a swimming pool, an indoor running track, a handball court, game rooms, reading rooms, club rooms, a dormitory with capacity for 100 occupants, and a large kitchen and dining room. (Later, an addition with more handball courts was constructed onto the west side of the new building.) Construction was begun and completed in 1911 at a cost of $110,000. The new West Side YMCA was dedicated by Cleveland Mayor Newton D. Baker on March 21, 1912.

In the years, and decades that followed, the West Side YMCA became more than just a place for young men to go and follow the tenets of what was then referred to as "muscular Christianity." In addition to the athletics, the clubs, the reading rooms and the other programs designed for young men, the building also served as a place for neighborhood residents to gather and participate in community events. There were open houses and receptions, meetings of a variety of local organizations, art and other exhibitions, political gatherings, concerts, workshops, fund-raising events, lectures, and even a circus, which were attended by residents of what was then called the Near West Side, but what eventually became known as the Ohio City neighborhood. As Cleveland's west side changed demographically in the post World War II era, the West Side YMCA changed with it, converting dormitories that had been built for young men moving to Cleveland into transitional housing for Cleveland's homeless, and hosting the Hispanic Culture Center in recognition of the growing Hispanic presence in the neighborhood. It also became a favorite place for older neighborhood men, especially retirees, to go and play handball. Change of a different type came to the West Side YMCA in 1953, when it was hit by the tornado that destroyed many buildings on the west side of Cleveland. The original wooden gymnasium building on the property was totally destroyed and the main building suffered substantial damage. The old complex roof built with Spanish tile on its sloped front was rebuilt as a flat roof, giving the building thereafter a very different look. By the 1980s, the West Side YMCA, like many other inner city YMCAs, was facing yet another challenge, this time to stay financially afloat. Efforts by members of the community helped to keep it open for another two decades, but, on September 1, 2004, the West Side YMCA closed its doors for good. The building was later sold to a developer who, in 2010, converted it into the Franklin Lofts.

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In 1852, John Ball, a Lake Erie ship captain, his wife Harriet Blake Ball, and their eight children moved into a new, two-story brick house on the northwest corner of State (West 29th) Street and Franklin Avenue (Boulevard), in what was then the City of Ohio (also referred to as "Ohio City"). Two years later, that city would merge with the City of Cleveland, and Ohio City would become Cleveland's near west side. The house, which today, some 170 years later, still stands on the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 29th Street is, according to local architectural historian Craig Bobby, of the Greek Revival style, but, in his estimation, was also influenced by the emerging Italianate style. The notable Greek Revival features of the house include the straightforward stone lintels and sills on almost all the windows and the front door, and the dentil course immediately under the roof eaves. The hipped roof and the cupola are viewed by Bobby as suggesting the Italianate influence,

Captain Ball, who was 40 years old when he moved into the house at 2902 Franklin Boulevard, which then bore an address of 181 Franklin Avenue, may have envisioned living in this roomy house with his wife and children for the rest of his life. However, his family's residence in it was cut short, possibly because of a series of personal tragedies that befell the Ball family between the years 1858 and 1861. In 1858, Ball's wife Harriet died suddenly, and then two of the couple's children, Mary (17) and Eunice (21) died from illnesses within three months of each other in December 1860 and February 1861. At some point in time after the death of Eunice, Captain Ball moved his remaining children out of the house on Franklin Avenue and leased it in 1862 to the Gilbert and Susan Grant family.

The house at 2902 Franklin Boulevard has for decades been commonly known in Cleveland as the Ball-Wilson house, because Gilbert and Susan Grant's daughter Ella, who was about eight years old in 1862 when the family moved into the house, grew up to become Ella Grant Wilson, a feminist pioneer, and one of the first women in Cleveland to successfully own and operate her own florist business. Later, she became well-known as a garden editor and columnist for the Plain Dealer, as well as the author of two books describing her interactions as a florist with the wealthy families who lived on Cleveland's grand Euclid Avenue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Grant family only lived in the house on Franklin Boulevard for five years, but that was enough time for Ella to form friendships with children of some of the more prominent west side Clevelanders that would last a lifetime. Among her west side childhood friends was Julia Castle, her "desk mate" at the neighborhood's Kentucky Street School. Julia was the youngest daughter of William Castle, mayor of Ohio City from 1853-1854 and, following the merger of Ohio City and Cleveland, the first mayor of the combined cities. The Castle family lived at 186 Franklin (which today would be 2913 Franklin), almost directly across the street from the Grants. In addition to the life-long friendships she formed there as a child, Ella Grant Wilson also made her first sale of flowers on Franklin Avenue. In her book Famous Old Euclid Avenue of Cleveland, Volume One, published in 1932, she recounted a story of a man walking by her house one day, noticing her flower garden and offering her two tickets to the circus in exchange for a bouquet of flowers.

In 1868, the Grant family moved from the house on Franklin Avenue to University Heights (today, Tremont) where Ella Grant just a few years later would build her first greenhouse on Jennings Avenue (West 14th Street), near Rowley Avenue, and start her florist business. After the Grant family's departure, the Ball family rented out the house at 2902 Franklin for several more years before selling it, in 1873, to Captain William B. Guyles. In that the Ball-Wilson House is named after both its relatively obscure first owner and a pioneer Cleveland woman who never actually owned it, an argument could be made that it should have instead been named after Captain Guyles. Like John Ball, Guyles was a lake captain, but a much more notable one. One biographical article contended that, in the 20 years that he commanded ships on the Great Lakes, he never had an accident which resulted in the loss of life or "considerable" property loss. After retiring as a lake captain, Guyles became a marine inspector for a commercial insurance company. In the early 1850s, he was elected to a seat on Ohio City's council and served on a committee that facilitated the merger of Ohio City and the City of Cleveland in 1854. In 1870, as a member of the city's Board of Trade, he proposed a design for the improvement of Cleveland's harbor that led to the construction of the city's first breakwater in 1885. After moving into the house on the corner of Franklin Avenue and State Street, Guyles became, like several other prominent residents of Franklin Avenue, a director of the People's Savings Bank, the president of which was then Robert Russell Rhodes, who lived across the street from him.

Captain Guyles lived in the house at 2902 Franklin Boulevard until his death in 1896. In 1900, his widow sold the house to the next door neighbor at 2908 Franklin, who used it as rental property for the next decade. The house became owner-occupied once again in 1912 when it was sold to James and Catherine (Moan) Walsh. The Walshes, who were second generation Irish Americans, lived in the house until their deaths, his in 1932 and hers in 1935. After Catherine's death, the house was inherited by one of her nephews, James V. Moan, who used it as rental property for the next three plus decades. In 1970, Moan sold the house to Thomas and Claire Farnsworth, early Ohio City pioneers, who lived in it for the next five years. It was about at this time that the house underwent rehabilitation, which included the removal of the wrap-around porch which had likely been added to it in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1980, the house was featured as one of the improved historic houses on the sixth annual Ohio City House and Garden tour. As of 2020, the house was no longer single-family occupied, but instead an Airbnb rental property.

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In the mid-afternoon hours of July 28, 1880, Col. John Dempsey, a banker from Shelby, Ohio, a small town in Richland County located about 80 miles southwest of Cleveland, appeared at a sheriff's sale being held on the south steps of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, in downtown Cleveland. There, he made a successful bid to purchase an elegant house that was designed by a reputable Cleveland architectural firm and located on the west side's grand Franklin Avenue. The house had been built in 1879 for Ceilan Milo Spitzer, who, like Dempsey, was a banker. However, before Spitzer could even move into his new house in early 1880, creditors of his German-American Bank, which had recently failed, forced its sale.

How and why John Dempsey came to Cleveland on July 28, 1880, to purchase the house that today has the address of 2830 Franklin Boulevard is lost to history. However, the long path which eventually brought him to Cleveland is more easily discernible. Dempsey was born on May 27, 1829, in Mountrath, Queens County, Ireland to James and Catherine Key Dempsey. In 1848, during the Great Famine in Ireland, his family immigrated to the United States, settling first in Sandusky, Ohio, where five members of the family, including his father and four of his siblings, died during a cholera outbreak. By 1860, he had married Martha Davis and had moved to Richland County, where he was a merchant and Martha was raising their first child, one-year old son James. Dempsey's business career was interrupted by the Civil War which broke out that year. He joined a militia and gained military fame as one of the "Squirrel Hunters" who defended Cincinnati from a threatened invasion by Southern troops in 1862. Later, he served in the 48th Ohio Infantry and 163rd Ohio Voluntary Infantry, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. After the war's conclusion, Col. Dempsey returned to Richland County where in a short time he amassed a fortune in the wholesale grocer and banking businesses and was reputed to be the wealthiest man in the county. By 1871, he was semi-retired and breeding race horses on his farm called "Mohican" in nearby Plymouth Township. Retirement--even semi-retirement--may not have suited John Dempsey and that may well have been why he decided in 1880 to move to Cleveland, then the second largest city in Ohio, to find new opportunities and to grow his commercial empire. In addition to purchasing the mansion on Franklin Avenue in July of that year, the following spring he erected a new commercial building on Bank (West 6th) Street and also became active in Cleveland's banking circles. In 1886, Dempsey became president of the newly chartered Euclid Avenue National Bank.

The house which John Dempsey purchased on Franklin Boulevard in 1880 had been designed by the architectural firm of Coburn and Barnum. Two and one-half stories tall and with nearly 4,000 square feet of living space, its design mirrored almost exactly that of another house on Case Avenue (East 40th Street), south of Cedar Avenue, that Frank Barnum had designed just three years earlier. The late 1870s was a period of transition for residential architecture in the United States, with interest in the Italianate style waning and enthusiasm for the new Queen Anne style not yet fully developed. Barnum's design for the house at 2830 Franklin may therefore be called "eclectic," according to Cleveland architectural historian Craig Bobby, its elements drawing inspiration from several different architectural styles. Its general massing, with its tower tucked into the "L" of the house, is borrowed from the Italian Villa style, as is the shallow bay on the first floor, right side of the house. The bracketing of the eves of the tower also suggests the Italianate style, but the tower's flat-topped cap reflects a Second Empire influence, and the house's gabled roof is not typical of Italianate houses. The house's design also borrows from the Gothic Revival style, particularly the quatrefoils on the projection from the left side of the roof and the barge boards along the eves of the gabled roof on the right side of the house. The current porch is not part of the original design.

Moving into the grand house on Franklin Avenue with John Dempsey and his wife Martha in 1880 were their daughters Mary Katherine (19), Nellie (12) and Florence (3). Their son James, then a 21 year old college student, was living in Gambier, Ohio, where he was attending classes at Kenyon College. During school breaks at Kenyon, and later during breaks at Columbia University where he attended law school, James resided with his parents in their house on Franklin Avenue. According to biographers, the first legal employment he found in Cleveland was in 1883 with the downtown law firm of Estep, Dickey and Squire. Two of the named partners, Moses Dickey and Andrew Squire were, like John Dempsey, Franklin Avenue residents. Andrew Squire lived in a house--since razed--that sat on the lot of what today is the Lutheran Family Services building at 4100 Franklin Boulevard, and Moses Dickey lived just a stone's throw away up the street at what is today 4211 Franklin Boulevard. It is no stretch of imagination to believe that law student James H. Dempsey was first introduced by his father to neighbors Moses Dickey and Andrew Squire, and that John Dempsey's business reputation and his residency on Franklin Avenue were important factors in the law firm's decision to hire James. In 1884, James H. Dempsey became a licensed attorney in Ohio, and, just six years later, he and Andrew Squire, along with Judge William B. Sanders, formed a new firm they called Squire, Sanders and Dempsey, which in the twentieth century became one of Cleveland's most prestigious law firms, specializing in corporate and municipal bond law. Today, the firm is known as Squire Patton Boggs, and it has become an international law firm that employs thousands of lawyers and has offices in twenty different countries around the world.

In 1892, just two years after his son co-founded Squire, Sanders and Dempsey, Col. John Dempsey again retired from business, this time for good. In retirement, he spent winters living in the house on Franklin Avenue in Cleveland and summers at his beloved Mohican Farm down in Richland County, where he died in August 1904. During this period, the Spitzer-Dempsey House became the year round residence of John Dempsey's oldest daughter, Mary Katherine, and her husband Ernest Cook, a prominent Cleveland lawyer and a close friend of James H. Dempsey. After Mary Katherine's untimely death in 1898, Ernest and the couple's four children remained in the house on Franklin Avenue, which later was bequeathed to them out of the estate of John Dempsey. Even after his children grew up and moved out, Ernest continued to live in the house until his death in 1929.

By the time Ernest Cook died in 1929, Franklin Avenue, which had been renamed Franklin Boulevard in 1921, was well into its transformation from a grand avenue lined with the beautiful single family houses of Cleveland's west side elite to a much less grand avenue with many of its beautiful houses razed and others converted into retail establishments, apartments or crowded rooming houses. After Cook's death, the Spitzer-Dempsey House too transformed. The 1930 federal census identified four families living at 2830 Franklin Boulevard in that year. Ten years later, according to the 1940 census, nine families were now living in the house. By 1945, according to an ad in the Plain Dealer, the house had 11 furnished suites. Following its conversion into a multi-family dwelling, the the house slowly deteriorated over the years, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting the general decline in the condition of Cleveland's housing stock and the rapid decline of the city's population during this period. By the 1980s, the Spitzer-Dempsey house was, like many other older houses on the near west side of Cleveland, vacant and in disrepair. In 1981, it acquired local notoriety when the body of a murdered west side teenage girl was discovered in one of its upstairs rooms. In the mid-1990s, the house experienced renewal, as many houses in Ohio City did, when it was rehabilitated by two lawyers who converted it into their law office. One of the lawyers later also made it her residence. Today, the Spitzer-Dempsey House is once again one of the grand and desirable residences on Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City.

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In 1934, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned the Civil Works Administration (CWA) to conduct a special census of American cities in the hope of gathering information that would be helpful in aiding the ongoing national economic recovery. According to an article that appeared in the Cleveland Press on August 22, 1934, when one of Roosevelt's census-takers arrived at the grand old mansion at 3805 Franklin Avenue here in Cleveland, he was stunned to learn that, not only were there 80 people living in the mansion, but there were another 30 living in a converted carriage house in the backyard and yet another 30 living in the house next door which was also part of the tenement complex. The owner of all three of those houses on that day when the CWA census-taker arrived was none other than 75-year-old Belden Seymour, head of a Cleveland real estate company and the son of the man with the same name who had built the mansion for his family, including his then teenage son Belden, 60 years earlier in 1874.

The first Belden Seymour was a native of Vermont who had migrated to northeast Ohio in 1848. At that time, Cleveland, and its municipal neighbor across the Cuyahoga River, Ohio City, were boom towns as a result of the completion of the Ohio-Erie Canal a decade earlier, connecting Lake Erie to the Ohio River, followed by the beginning of the grand railroad era. Seymour shrewdly invested in real estate here, particularly in Ohio City, which, after annexation to Cleveland in 1854, became the latter city's west side. Soon, Belden Seymour was one of the west side's wealthy elites.

Seymour and his family were living on Pearl Street (today, West 25th Street) in 1865, when his good friend and the former mayor of Cleveland, Irvine U. Masters, died, leaving a will that named Seymour as one of his executors. Included in Masters' estate was his Greek Revival-style house which had been built on the southwest corner of Franklin Avenue and Kentucky (West 38th) Street in 1853. Seymour purchased this house from the estate along with an adjacent vacant lot. In 1871, he moved the former mayor's house some 80 feet west to that adjacent vacant lot, and then began construction of a large Italianate-style house on the former site of the Masters house. Completed in 1874, the mansion, with more than 7500 square feet of living space, a three-story tower (visible in the 1877 Bird's Eye View of Cleveland map), ornate window work, a skylight--rare for this period, balconies and bay windows, an elegant double front door and a beautiful front porch and portico, became one of the grand homes on the west side's version of Millionaires' Row.

Belden Seymour lived in this grand house until his death in 1889. In the decade that followed, pursuant to an 1896 design by architect John N. Richardson, Seymour's widow Eleanor and son Belden converted the mansion into a four-family luxury dwelling and also converted the carriage house into a single family dwelling, moving the latter building easterly to its present day location on the lot. After Eleanor died in 1910, ownership of the mansion and converted carriage house, and the former Masters House next door, passed to her two married adult children, Belden and Mary Eleanor, and then eventually to Belden alone. Under his ownership, the mansion (3805 Franklin), the converted carriage house (3801 Franklin), and the old Masters house (3811 Franklin) gradually began to house more and more tenants, even in attic and basement areas, until by 1934, as President Roosevelt's census-taker found out, the three structures together constituted one of the largest tenement complexes in Cleveland.

Sometime in the 1920s, and no later than by 1926, Belden Seymour hired Elizabeth "Pearl" Hayne, one of his tenants at 3805 Franklin Avenue, to be his property manager. It was a hiring decision which would have consequences for the future of the Belden Seymour house and the other two associated houses. Hayne managed the properties for Seymour until shortly before his death in 1937, when he sold the houses to the A. M. McGregor House. Within two years of the transfer, the City of Cleveland, possibly following up on information gleaned from the 1934 CWA census, began citing all of the houses for multiple violations of the city's tenement code. It was in that same year--probably not coincidentally, that the A. M. McGregor House transferred ownership of the houses to another corporation, Cleveland Rentals, Inc, formed by property manager Hayne.

For the next fifty years, the Belden Seymour House and the other two associated houses, were owned and managed by the Hayne family. At one point in time, the Belden Seymour House was even called "Pearl Hayne's Family Hotel." As had been the case since at least as early as 1939, the City of Cleveland continued to find multiple code violations at the Haynes' properties, and, on at least three occasions, the Belden Seymour house was substantially damaged by fire, possibly as a result of some of these code violations. Continued code enforcement activity by city building and fire officials, however, eventually resulted in a reduction of the number of tenants living at the houses and the establishment of safer, healthier, and more sanitary living conditions.

In 1989, Alberta Therrien, the daughter of Pearl Haynes who with her husband had been managing the Belden Seymour house and the two other properties since her mother's death in 1961, transferred the properties to Franklin Estates, Inc., a corporation formed by Dr. James L.. Hauer and his partner Richard Turnbull. Little work was done to the exteriors of either house during their ownership. In 2016, Franklin Estates, Inc. transferred the properties to 3801 Franklin LLC, a corporation formed by Adam Hayoun. Since acquiring the properties, Hayoun has undertaken efforts to renovate both the historic Seymour and Masters houses. In 2017, renovation of the Masters House at 3811 Franklin, and its conversion to a two-family dwelling, was completed. In that same year, Hayoun turned his attention to the Belden Seymour mansion at 3805 Franklin, tearing off layers of insulbrick and vinyl siding and revealing for the first time in decades the original wood siding and other wood architectural features of the house. In late 2017, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission issued a certificate of appropriateness for Hayoun's proposed Belden Seymour house renovation. As of August 2018, that proposal remained pending before other city boards. It appears likely that, in the near future, the Belden Seymour House will join the Irvine U. Masters House as the two of the most recently renovated, houses on historic Franklin Boulevard.

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The Second Empire style house at 327 Franklin Avenue (today, 4606 Franklin Boulevard), designed by the notable architectural firm of Griese & Weile, was undoubtedly a place of refuge for Cleveland Mayor Stephen Buhrer, as the city struggled to sort itself out politically in the wake of the horrendous United States Civil War. When Buhrer, a Democrat, was elected mayor on April 1, 1867 after three consecutive Republican administrations dating back to the beginning of that war, the Plain Dealer, then a partisian Democrat paper, couldn't resist. In its next day edition, it not only celebrated the victory, but also mocked the local Republicans who had branded the Democrats as "traitors" and "disloyal." A week later, on April 9, the Cleveland Leader, the partisan Republican paper, concluded that Buhrer had only been elected because of "a fusion of the German beer-drinking vote and Democrats." And the Leader was just getting started. It spilled much ink during Buhrer's two terms (1867-1871), criticizing the mayor, who owned a distillery business, often referring to him as a "dictator" and claiming that his police force was notoriously soft on liquor violations, while hard on citizens when they publicly assembled to celebrate post-Civil War Republican achievements like the Civil Rights amendments to the Constitution.

Stephen Buhrer led a life that was a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale. He was born in Zoar, Ohio in 1825. When his father died in 1829, Buhrer was bound over to the Society of Separatists who operated a communal farm there. He began working on the farm at a young age and learned the cooper trade. He left the community when he turned 18 years old, eventually settling in Cleveland in 1844. He initially worked as a cooper here, but soon left the trade and founded Eagle Distillery, a wholesale and retail liquor business which made him wealthy. It had offices and a warehouse on Merwin Street in the fast-growing Cleveland Centre. Working in a firm next door as a bookkeeper was young John D. Rockefeller, who once asked Buhrer for a job. The two later became life-long friends.

Buhrer married Eva Schneider, a German immigrant, in 1848, and the couple moved to a house in Ohio City. In 1855, the year following that city's annexation to Cleveland, he entered local politics, winning the Ward 11 trustee (council) election at just 29 years of age. Buhrer would go on to serve three terms as a ward councilman before being elected mayor in 1867. As councilman, one of his universally acknowledged Civil War era achievements was successfully satisfying the federal quota requirements for his ward, thereby easing his constituents' fears of becoming subjected to what many then viewed as an oppressive federal draft. Later, as Cleveland mayor, he was credited with building the city's first workhouse and for laying the groundwork for the construction of the first viaduct over the Cuyahoga River, subsequently completed in 1878.

In 1869, the same year in which he began his second term as mayor, Buhrer, and his wife and their three children, moved into the grand house on Franklin Avenue. Buhrer lived in the house for almost 40 years, until his death in 1907 at the age of 82. His second wife, Marguerite Paterson--Buhrer's first wife, Eva, had died in 1889-- continued to live there until her own death in 1914. It would be the last time that the large house with approximately 5,000 square feet of living space was used as a single family dwelling.

Upon the death of Stephen Buhrer's widow, the house at 4606 Franklin Avenue passed by will to her brother, Abraham Paterson. By the time Paterson inherited the property, Franklin Avenue was no longer the west side's answer to millionaires' row that it had been in the nineteenth century. Like many other owners of large houses on Franklin Avenue, Paterson converted the Buhrer house into a multi-family dwelling. According to the 1920 federal census, there were three families and a total of 13 persons, including Paterson and his wife, living there. By 1930, Paterson had sold the house and, according to the census of that year, the new owner had increased the number of tenant families living there to eight, with 21 people sharing living space in the house.

Over the years that followed, which included the decade of the Great Depression, followed by several decades of general decline on Cleveland's near west side, the condition of the once grand Buhrer house also declined. At some point in time between the 1930s and 1950s, the house lost its front porticos and its ornate window shutters. By 1960, as a tax photo of the house taken in 1961 reveals, it was a house which hardly resembled the structure designed by Carl Griese and Albert Weile. By the end of the 1970s, the house appeared to be almost in shambles, with photos showing a board nailed across its front door. But then in 1980, it was rescued by Charles and Alice Butts, who renovated the house along with a number of others in Ohio City during this period. As a result of the Butts' efforts, the Buhrer house once again began to at least resemble its original design, although the porticos were not restored. Under the Butts family ownership, the Buhrer house has now for more than three decades served the Ohio City neighborhood as a multi-family dwelling with five suites. In 2018, the house celebrated its 150th birthday on historic Franklin Boulevard.

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In Benjamin S. Cogswell's 1908 obituary, the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that, following his election in 1875 as Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts, his wife "began one of the most vigorous liquor campaigns ever seen in this county. It resulted in the indictment of nearly 1,000 saloon keepers. Cogswell dropped out of politics at the end of his term." These few sentences say little about Benjamin Cogswell and more about his wife, Helen Marion Cogswell, the founder of Cogswell Hall and an early era activist in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the national organization founded in Cleveland in 1874 to promote sobriety and to lobby for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States.

After her husband retired from politics in 1878, Helen Cogswell shifted her work at the WCTU into a different arena. She became a member of the Committee on Prison and Jail Visitation. She visited jails all over Cuyahoga County, speaking to incarcerated women, listening to their stories and providing them with moral encouragement. And she advocated that the WCTU establish a home for these "friendless" women so that, upon their release from jail, they could have a chance to become useful members of society. In 1892, acting on Cogswell's recommendations, the WCTU created the first "Training Home for Friendless Girls" in a rented space at Forest Avenue (East 37th Street) and Scovill Avenue (Community College Drive). While the home initially focused on the rehabilitation of young women already in jail, by 1897 it began engaging in more preventive action--providing a home and training that would keep young women without friends or family out of jail.

In 1899, the Training Home for Friendless Girls moved to the west side of Cleveland and into a large house at the corner of Duane Avenue (West 32nd Street) and Franklin Boulevard, after an anonymous donor purchased the house and donated it to the WCTU. The Training Home remained at this location until 1914 when the present larger house at 7200 Franklin Boulevard was built. It is three stories tall, has a brick facade and is English gothic style. The architect of the new house, which has 22 single rooms for residents, was Charles Hopkinson, who designed a number of buildings on Franklin Boulevard, including the Franklin Circle Masonic Temple. Helen Cogswell, who had founded the Home for Friendless Girls in 1892, lived long enough to see the home move into and thrive at its new location. She died four years later In 1918, at the age of 85.

Over the decades that followed, the names and residential policies of the Training Home changed as urban life in Cleveland threw different challenges at young women and others at risk in the community. In 1952, the house was renamed Cogswell Hall to honor its founder. In the same year, it became primarily a short-term residence for young women attending nearby trade or business schools, or working at low income jobs. Then, in the early 1970s, Cogswell Hall shifted its focus, and opened its doors to low-income elderly women, whom it determined were now the members of the community with the greatest need for affordable housing. In the 1990s, there was another change when Cogswell Hall began providing housing to single adult women of all ages. Two decades later, in 2009, when a new addition was added to the original house and separate men and women bathroom facilities installed, federal Fair Housing laws became applicable to Cogswell Hall and it began renting rooms to men for the first time in its history.

A Monument where Girls Cease to be Friendless. That's what the Plain Dealer called the Training Home for Friendless Girls in an article published on March 10, 1918, just a little over a month following the death of founder Helen Marion Cogswell. Nearly 100 years have now have passed since her death. Over those years, Cogswell Hall has evolved into a monument not only to the good work which she did, but also to the work which her successors have done and continue to do to this day, providing affordable housing to both men and women in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.

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There was a time when there were no public high schools west of the Allegheny Mountains. When children living in the Midwest could only obtain a college preparatory education by attending private academies, the tuition for which only wealthy parents could afford. That all changed, however, in 1846 when Central High School, the first free public high school west of the Alleghenies, was founded in Cleveland. At first located in the basement of a Universalist church on Prospect Street (Avenue), it was afterwards for many years located in its own building near the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Erie (East Ninth) Street, just west of Scofield's boarding house.

While Central High School was accessible to all Cleveland children in its first few years of operation, it was not, after the annexation of Ohio City in 1854, very accessible to Cleveland children who lived west of the Cuyahoga River. Especially in an era when there were no motor vehicles to transport children to school and the bridges that crossed the river were far and few between. West siders petitioned Cleveland City Council for their own high school, but a state law restricted the city to only one public high school. According to several newspaper accounts, including one that appeared in the Cleveland Leader on June 12, 1910, it was A. G. Hopkinson, formerly principal of an Ohio City grade school for advanced students, who came up with the idea that building a "branch" high school on the west side would not violate the state law. City Council was apparently persuaded and, on April 7, 1855, it passed legislation creating east and west "divisions" of Central High School. Hopkinson became the first principal of the new west side high school, serving in the office until 1870.

Branch High School, as the west side division of Central High School was initially called, held its first classes on the top floor of Kentucky School, located on Kentucky (West 38th) Street near Terrett Avenue. In 1861, West High School-- by this time everyone had dispensed with the fiction that it was a branch of Cleveland's east side high school-- moved to a new building, constructed on a small parcel of land at the intersection of Clinton Avenue and what is today West 29th Street and Dexter Place, not far from Franklin Circle. It remained at this location for twenty-three years until a growing west side population created the need for a larger school, resulting in the purchase of land and the construction in 1884 of a large two-story red brick and stone school building at the intersection of Bridge and Randall Avenues. The west side's school age population continued to grow rapidly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in large part as the result of the annexations to the city of West Cleveland and Brooklyn Village in 1894. The City responded, first in 1900, by building a second west side public high school--Lincoln High School-- at the intersection of Scranton Road and Castle Avenue, and then in 1902, by relocating West High School further to the west, on a larger site and into a larger three-story brick and stone building on Franklin Boulevard near what is today West 68th Street. (The school building at Bridge and Randall later became a commerce high school, then a junior high school, and was finally home to Lourdes Academy, a girls Catholic high school, from 1944 until 1971, the year the building was razed.)

West High School remained at its Franklin Boulevard location for the next seven decades. During these years its teachers and students preserved and continued many of the traditions and school organizations which had roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organizations like the Dorian Literary Society (1881), the Castilian Literary Society (1898), the Thespian Dramatic Society (1902) and the Clionian Historical Society (1902). At the end of every school year, the outgoing Class president passed to the incoming Class president a small wooden box called "The Casket," which contained metal tablets listing the names of graduating students from classes dating back to 1881, when the high school was still located on Clinton Avenue near Franklin Circle.

In addition to its peculiar traditions and organizations, West High was also notable as the alma mater of a number of locally and nationally prominent Clevelanders. For example, Mary Quintrell (Class of 1858), the first woman to run for public office in Cleveland--School Council in 1895. James Ford Rhodes (Class of 1865) and Albert Bushnell Hart (Class of 1870), both prominent historians and both honored with Cleveland schools named in their honor. Linda A. Eastman (Class of 1885), who, when named Librarian of Cleveland Public Library in 1918, became the first woman in the United States to hold this position in a library of such size and significance. Alwin C. Ernst (Class of 1899), founder of the accounting firm Ernst & Ernst, today Ernst & Young. Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd (Class of 1902), the highest ranking military officer to die in the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Lillian M. Westropp (Class of 1903) and her sister Clara (Class of 1904), pioneer women bankers who founded Women's Federal Savings and Loan in 1922. And New York Metropolitan Opera star Mildred Miller (January Class of 1943) and her husband University of Pittsburgh Chancellor and retired Air Force Brigadier General Wesley Posvar (June Class of 1943).

In 1970, West High merged with Lincoln High, creating Lincoln-West High School, a new high school with its campus on West 30th Street in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. After the merger, the old West High school building on Franklin Boulevard continued to serve as home to West Junior High for an additional seven years until 1977, when it was torn down to make room for Joseph M. Gallagher Junior High, a new school named after a long-time member of the Cleveland Board of Education. With the razing of the old school buildings at the Franklin Boulevard site, and the razing of all of the other buildings that once served as its home, there no longer exist any buildings in Cleveland that stand as a memorial to West High, the city's first west side public high school.

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As you drive west on Franklin Boulevard, between West 58th and West 65th Streets, it is surprisingly easy to miss the house at 6016 Franklin, despite its high pitched roof, its multiplicity of windows, dormers and entrances, its towers and other interesting architectural details, and despite the fact that it is one of the largest houses in the neighborhood. Situated on the north side of the street between two more noticeable brick apartment buildings, you might just unknowingly pass by it. But you shouldn't. It was once the home of one of Cleveland's most prominent nineteenth century architects, and it is worth the time to stop and admire. And, see if you can discern the Latin inscription on the house's gable. It seems to sum up the architect's beliefs about family and religion.

Forrest A. Coburn, the designer and original owner of the house at 6016 Franklin Boulevard, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1848. When he was 14 years old, his family moved to the Cleveland area, initially settling on Coe Ridge (Lorain) Road in Rockport Township, but later moving to the west side of Cleveland. In 1866, at age 18, Coburn entered the work force as a bookkeeper, but soon found his life work when in 1868 he was hired to be a draftsman in the downtown offices of Joseph Ireland, one of Cleveland's great early architects. Coburn worked for Ireland, and later Walter Blythe--another important early Cleveland architect, until 1873, when he left town to study architecture in New York. In 1875, he returned here an architect, working at first in Blythe's office, but in 1878, leaving that employment to form a partnership with Frank Seymour Barnum, who later became the architect for the Cleveland School Board, designing many of the districts early twentieth century school buildings.

Coburn and Barnum, which initially had offices in the Hardy Block on Euclid Avenue--just a stone's throw from Public Square, quickly became one of the city's best and most prolific architectural firms. Perhaps most telling of how quickly the firm rose to prominence was its selection, in 1881, to design the catafalque for President James Garfield, when his body lay in state at Monumental (Public) Square from September 24-26, before being transported to and buried at Lake View Cemetery.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, according to the records of the Cleveland Landmarks Commission, Coburn and Barnum designed at least 143 buildings in the Cleveland area, a number of them considered to be among the best designed in the city during this era. One--the Blackstone Building, on the southwest corner of Seneca (West 3rd) Street and Frankfort Avenue, which was built in 1881 by Jacob Perkins and demolished in the early 1960s, has been cited by one architectural historian as a leading example of the work of the new class of post-Civil War architects in Cleveland who, in the last several decades of the nineteenth century, produced some of the city's grandest downtown buildings.

The firm was also known for its residential designs. It designed 20 of the mansions on Millionaires' Row, including the Howe Mansion, which today is located on the campus of Cleveland State University and known as Parker Hannifin Hall. The firm also designed a number of houses and churches on the west side of Cleveland that are still standing, including the Spitzer-Dempsey House at 2830 Franklin Boulevard, the Sarah Bousfield ("Stone Gables") House at 3806 Franklin Boulevard, the George Warmington Duplex at 4906-08 Franklin Boulevard, the John Pankhurst House at 3206-08 Clinton Avenue, the Thomas Axworthy Houses at 3802 and 3804 Clinton Avenue, and Olivet Baptist Church at 5022 Bridge Avenue. The firm also designed a number of cultural institution buildings in University Circle and elsewhere, including the still-standing Olney Art Gallery on West 14th Street in Tremont.

The influence of Forrest Coburn extended, however, far beyond the nineteenth century Cleveland area buildings that he designed. Two of the architects in his office, Walter Hubbell and Czech immigrant W. Dominick Benes, after Coburn's death, started their own firm--Hubbell and Benes, which designed a number of Cleveland's best known early twentieth century buildings, among them the West Side Market (1907-1910) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1917). Another architect in the office, John H. Edelman, later moved to Chicago and became the mentor of a young Louis Sulllivan, the architect who would eventually become known to the world as the father of the American skyscraper.

For much of his early career, Forrest Coburn had lived in a simple house at 86 Root (1901 West 47th) Street, but in 1887 he purchased several lots on Franklin Boulevard and began drawing up plans for the large house at 6016 Franklin Boulevard. Completed in 1890, the house was designed as a duplex, with the Coburn family living in the larger "half" of the house, and the smaller "half" rented out. Forrest Coburn lived in this house for only seven years, dying--it was said-- from overwork in 1897 at the age of 49. After his death, his widow and children continued to reside in the house until 1912 when it was sold out of the family. In 1942, the house was converted into a seven-suite apartment building, which it remained as until 2002, when, after an extensive renovation, it was converted into a four unit luxury condominium. It is now, once again, one of the jewels of the Franklin-West Clinton Historic District.

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Many of the houses on Franklin Boulevard tell a story of the wealth that could be accumulated in Cleveland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the City became an industrial powerhouse in the Midwest. The house at 5005 Franklin Boulevard is one such house. But this house--like others along the Boulevard, also tells a story of renewal and restoration.

Built in 1874 by Dudley Baldwin, a wealthy nineteenth century Cleveland railroad man, banker, and real estate developer, the house was first owned and occupied by Harvey and Alice Murray, before it was purchased in 1882 by Teresa Roberts, the wife of William J. Roberts, an up and coming industrialist in Cleveland's early industrial era. Born in 1844 in Cincinnati, "W. J.," as he was known, left the Queen City and came to Cleveland when he was about 30 years old to find his fortune. It was an era when Cleveland was beginning to catch (and would later surpass) Cincinnati in both population and industrial might.

Robertsin became associated with two Clevelanders, Samuel Gibson and Fred Beckwith. In 1874, the three started the Gibson, Roberts and Beckwith Lead Works on Champlain Street, where the Terminal Tower Complex sits today. Later, the company moved its manufacturing operations to the Flats on the east bank of the Cuyahoga River, in an area then known as Cleveland Centre. There, the company built a new factory for its lead piping and other lead products manufacturing. The business rapidly grew and continued to operate at this location well into the twentieth century when it merged with several other companies to form the United Lead Co. Roberts continued his involvement in the business, and later, once his reputation as a businessman was firmly established, also became involved in Cleveland's banking industry, becoming President of Brooklyn Savings & Loan Association.

By all accounts, the Roberts were very happy in their grand Italianate house at 5005 Franklin Boulevard. One story that has been passed down in the family is that, at one point, W. J. and Teresa Roberts decided to sell the house--possibly to move to an even grander address, but, after making the deal, were so unhappy at the prospect of leaving the house, that they bought it back--at a higher price than what they sold it for! The couple and their children lived in the house for nearly 40 years, until his death in 1919. The following year, Teresa sold the house and moved into an apartment.

After the Roberts family left, and as Franklin Boulevard became a less desirable location in the first half of the twentieth century for Cleveland's wealthy West Siders, the house, like many on Franklin Boulevard, searched for a new use and, like many others, became a boarding house. Elida Humphrey, a widow, operated the house as such from the late 1920s until her death in 1957. By this time, two new problems threatened neighborhood houses as deindustrialization and flight to the suburbs hit the City of Cleveland hard. Many of the grand old homes on Franklin Boulevard began to deteriorate from age, neglect and disrepair.

In the 1970s, as Ohio City began to experience re-gentrification and Detroit-Shoreway activists to the west began their efforts to revitalize historic Gordon Square, a number of the grand old homes on Franklin Boulevard experienced renewal and restoration. Henry Kinicki and Tillie Tybuszewski, who purchased the W. J. Roberts house in 1976, converted it back to a single-family dwelling and lived in it for nearly three decades. In 2005, they sold the house to Russell Cendrowski and Roger Scheve, who then painstakingly restored it remarkably to its original nineteenth century grandeur. Next trip down Franklin Boulevard, be sure to pay attention to the beautiful Italianate house on the southwest corner of the Boulevard and West 50th Street.

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The years 1856 to 1865 were tough ones for all Americans, as the country reeled toward and then fought a bloody civil war over slavery. But they were especially tough years for Maria Quarles Barstow. In 1856, her husband, William A. Barstow, the third governor of Wisconsin, left office under a cloud of a scandal as the result of campaign law violations in his re-election effort. Then came his failure and embarrassment on the battlefield in the Civil War. And finally, just months after the war ended, William Barstow suddenly died, leaving her a 42-year old widow with four boys--ranging in age from eleven to nineteen, to raise.

And that's when Cleveland, and the house at 4211 Franklin Avenue, gave her a reprieve from a horrendous decade. Prior to 1865, Maria had never lived in Cleveland. However, her husband's family were west side pioneer settlers and she came to Cleveland in late December of that year to bury her husband and to start her life anew. Her husband's spinster sister and bachelor brother took her and the boys in--all of them living together in a small house on State (West 29th) Street. Then, in 1868, she had a opportunity to gather her family together in their own home. She rented the new Second Empire style house near the corner of Franklin Avenue and Harbor (West 44th) Street that had just been built by German immigrant carpenter Ferdinand Dryer.

Maria had landed in a good neighborhood. Just across the street from 4211 Franklin lived Hannes Tiedeman, who had not yet torn down his modest house and replaced it with Franklin Castle. Also living on the street a few blocks to the west was Stephen Buhrer, who had just been elected Cleveland's mayor. Up the street toward Franklin Circle lived Henry Coffinberry, a prominent early Cleveland industrialist and son of Judge Coffinberry. Further up the street was coal magnate and real estate developer Daniel Rhodes. Living next door to Rhodes were his daughter and son-in-law Marcus Hanna, who one day would put William McKinley in the White House. Two of Rhodes's sons, including noted American historian James Ford Rhodes, also lived nearby on the Avenue.

Maria Barstow and her sons only lived in the house at 4211 Franklin Avenue for about three years. It was likely financial circumstances that forced her in 1872 to move back in with her husband's family on State Street. But perhaps the three years in the new house on Franklin Avenue were long enough to stabilize and rebuild her family, and introduce her sons to Cleveland's business elite. Frank Barstow married a daughter of Stephen Buhrer, becoming not only connected to this Cleveland political family, but also to John D. Rockefeller, a long-time friend of Buhrer. Likely through this family connection, Frank met Rockefeller and eventually became one of the founders of the original Standard Oil Trust. He amassed a fortune by the time of his death in 1909.

Maria Barstow survived her husband William by more than 50 years, dying in 1916 in Lima, Ohio, at the age of 93. The former first lady of Wisconsin is buried alongside her husband William in Brookmere Cemetery, on the southwest side of Cleveland.

The house at 4211 Franklin has been home over the years to other interesting people, including the vice-president of a large Cleveland industrial business from 1879 to 1883, and an Ohio circuit court judge whose family owned the house for almost 40 years from 1883 to 1920. But in more recent years the house fell into disrepair and faced foreclosure and possible demolition. It was rescued in 2012 by the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation. The stately nineteenth century home now has new owners who have restored to its nineteenth century beauty and grandeur.

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School children walking past the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street will someday remember it as where the Rite Aid neighborhood drugstore was located. Adults in the neighborhood remember that it used to be where the old Pick-N-Pay grocery store stood. Only the older residents of the neighborhood remember that up until the mid-1960s the Kaufman Funeral Home stood on this corner. And perhaps there are only a few, if any, left in the neighborhood who remember that, before it was the Kaufman Funeral Home, the grand old house on the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street belonged to George August Tinnerman, a German immigrant who launched one of the great industrial enterprises in the history of Cleveland.

George August Tinnerman was born in Bavaria in 1845. In 1847, the year before the 1848 Revolutions which shook central Europe from Vienna to Paris, George immigrated to America with his parents Henry and Sophia Tinnerman. Like his father who was a wheelright, George entered the trades but as a tinner. In 1868, he opened a hardware store on Lorain Avenue--just east of its intersection with Fulton Road. Among the products George sold were cast iron stoves. In 1875, according to his son Albert, George became dissatisfied with the cumbersome cast iron stoves and invented the first steel range--a forerunner of today's range stoves. George became so successful in selling his new steel stoves that, in 1913, he closed his hardware store and began to exclusively manufacture stoves and ranges.

In 1890, as George Tinnerman grew financially successful, he and his family moved from their house on Fulton, which abutted the Tinnerman stove and range manufacturing plant, to a more fashionable address on the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and Gordon Street (now West 65th Street). George and his wife Caroline completed the raising of their four children in this house, and, when the children became adults, three of them acquired houses on Franklin Boulevard in the 6000-7000 block--none more than a few minutes walk from their parents' home on the corner of West 65th. Members of the Tinnerman family continued to live on Franklin Boulevard until well into the decade of the 1940s.

In 1925, George A. Tinnerman died and his son Albert H. Tinnerman, who until 1938 lived at 6910 Franklin Boulevard, took over the family business. In 1925, Albert invented a new fastener for stoves called a "speed nut." As it turned out, Albert's invention had application not only in the manufacture of stoves, but also in the manufacture of automobiles and aircraft. In the 1930s, Albert's son, George A. Tinnerman II, convinced Henry Ford to use the speed nuts in his automobiles, and in the 1940s, during World War II, the United States government also began using Tinnerman's speednuts in its aircraft. One source claimed that the federal government's use of the Tinnerman speed nut not only reduced the weight of American war planes, but also cut production time in half.

In 1950, Tinnerman Products-- now a national manufacturer of speed nuts and other clips and fasteners, moved from its original location on Fulton Road to a new state of the arts facility on Brookpark Road in the suburb of Brooklyn. During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Tinnerman Products continued to grow under the guidance of Albert Tinnerman and then his daughter Alberta Buttris, a third generation Tinnerman and granddaughter of George A. Tinnerman. In 1969, the company's separate corporate existence in Cleveland came to an end when it merged with Cleveland industrial giant, Eaton Corporation.

Today, the Tinnerman Stove and Range Company building at 2048 Fulton Road is home to Vista Color Imaging, a visual marketing solutions business. The former 100,000 square foot Tinnerman Products headquarters and factory in Brooklyn is now vacant and in search of a new business owner. And at the corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 65th Street, a Rite Aid drug store now stands where the fashionable home of George A. Tinnerman once stood. But, with three other homes of the George Tinnerman family still standing on the 6000-7000 block, you can still feel the Tinnerman presence on Franklin Boulevard.

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In 1886, 69-year-old Abraham Teachout, a fierce supporter of the Prohibition movement gave a speech at the party's annual Cuyahoga County convention which he ended with the words: "The saloons must go but I am afraid I will not see the day." Teachout, who had been the Prohibition Party's district congressional candidate in 1884, did not live to see the age of Prohibition—but it was not for lack of trying. The owner and builder of the Teachout house at 4514 Franklin Boulevard, lived 26 more years after giving that speech, dying in 1912 at the age of 95 years old. America's short-lived Prohibition era would not begin until the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920—some eight years after Teachout's death.

Abraham Teachout, one of Cleveland's wealthy nineteenth century businessmen and a close friend of John D. Rockefeller, was born in western New York in 1817. In 1836, he moved with his family to northeastern Ohio, settling in North Royalton, where the Teachouts are considered to be one of that suburb's early pioneer families. Over the course of the next 20 years Abraham engaged in a number of businesses moving to several cities, including Painesville, Columbus and Chattanooga, Tennessee, before achieving success as a Cleveland lumber merchant. Teachout was one of the first to ship lumber out of the South by rail to urban centers north of the Ohio River. He also was founder of the A. Teachout Co., which specialized in the manufacture of doors, sashes and other related building construction materials. The company, which was eventually headed by three generations of the Teachout family, had its offices on Prospect Avenue (formerly Michigan Street) in downtown Cleveland for many years.

The Teachout House is one of the most interesting houses on Franklin Boulevard. The house has over 5,000 square feet of living area and is notable for its impressive windows and its somewhat onion-shaped cupola. Teachout purchased the land upon which the Teachout house was built in 1883. At the time, he and his family lived on Fulton Road. It is unknown how long the house was under construction, but the family moved into the house shortly after construction was completed in 1887. Abraham lived in the house until his death in 1912. During his 25 years of residence on Franklin Boulevard, the elderly businessman was often seen being driven in his carriage by his African-American carriage driver, Mack Henry, a former slave. After Abraham's death, his widow (who was his third wife--the first two wives predeceased him) remained in the house another decade, selling the house to the Michael and Mary Malloy family in 1924.

Abraham Teachout was a notable supporter of Hiram College. Hiram was founded in 1850 by the Christian Disciples of Christ congregation of which Teachout was a long time member. He worshiped at the Franklin Circle Christian Church  for nearly 50 years and served as superintendent of the church's Sunday school program for 25 years. Abraham sat on the Hiram College Board of Trustees for many years, as did his son Albert and later his grandson David. It was as a result of a $10,000 gift by Abraham Teachout that Hiram College built its first college library in 1900. Prior to the construction of a new library building in 1995, Hiram College's library was known as the Teachout-Cooper Memorial Library. Abraham Teachout and many members of his immediate family and other family relatives are buried in the Teachout family plot at Riverside Cemetery.

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Founded in 1896, Lutheran Hospital is one not only one of Ohio City's oldest institutions. It is also one of the largest, its campus covering an area from Franklin Boulevard south to Jay Avenue, and from West 25th Street west to West 28th Street. The hospital has also had a major impact on historic Franklin Circle.

Organized by the Evangelical Lutheran Hospital Association, the hospital was first sited in the Beckwith House, located on the northwest side of Franklin Circle at 247 Hanover (West 28th) Street. That house was built by M.E. Beckwith, one of Cleveland's earliest professional photographers. (In the mid-nineteenth century, Beckwith operated a "photographic parlor and art studio" at the corner of West 25th Street and Detroit.)

In 1898, the hospital moved across the Circle and purchased the Marcus Hanna mansion at 2603 Franklin Boulevard. Hanna was the man who engineered William McKinley's successful 1896 presidential campaign and, as a result, became known as a political king maker. His mansion had been built in 1869 on land deeded to his wife by her father, Daniel P. Rhodes. A wealthy west side industrialist, Rhodes lived next door on the southeast side of the Circle at 2609 Franklin. Hanna and his family lived in their mansion on Franklin from 1868 until 1890. (In the latter year, they moved to the far west side into a new mansion at 10400 Lake Avenue, The area would later become known as Cleveland's Edgewater neighborhood.)

In 1922, Lutheran Hospital razed the Hanna Mansion (and the Warmington mansion east of it) and built in their place its first hospital building. In 1948, the hospital expanded west, in the process razing Daniel Rhodes' Franklin Circle mansion, which had been serving as the home of St. John's Orphanage since the death of Rhodes' widow Sophia in 1909.

In the decades that followed, Lutheran Hospital expanded its Franklin Boulevard campus an additional number of times, as a result of major projects in the 1960s and 1970s. Now well into its second century of operation, Lutheran Hospital, which became part of the Cleveland Clinic system in 1996, continues to be a large and vibrant institution in Ohio City and continues to have an imposing presence on historic Franklin Circle.

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The origins of the founding of Franklin Circle Christian Church, located at 1688 Fulton Road, lie in America's Second Great Awakening, an early nineteenth century movement which was characterized by a resurgence in religious enthusiasm and a diversification in Christian religious groups. Northeastern Ohio became a center of this new religious fervor and home to a number of new Christian religious groups, including the Mormons (Kirtland), the Shakers (Warrensville Township), and the Amish (Holmes County). In this era, as Cleveland State University history professor David Goldberg taught his graduate history students, Ohio beckoned to religious enthusiasts much like a century or so later California would beckon to altruistic baby boomers.

The Disciples of Christ, which founded Franklin Circle Christian Church in 1842, was another new Christian group that grew out of the Second Great Awakening and found fertile ground for its new religion in northeastern Ohio. The Disciples of Christ were adherents to the religious philosophy of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, father and son ministers, who urged Christians to put aside the doctrinal differences that divided different sects and return to the principles of the primitive Christian Church. In 1848, the parish built its first permanent church on Franklin Circle. It was large and cavernous and was known to its parishioners as "God's Barn." Three decades later, the parish hired the noted Cleveland architectural firm of Cudell and Richardson to design a new church on Franklin Circle--on a parcel of land just south of "God's Barn." The new church was built in the years 1874-1875 and has become one of the oldest and best known landmarks on the near west side of Cleveland.

Franklin Circle Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ have a long history of promoting education and engaging in social activism in northeastern Ohio. In 1850, the Disciples of Christ founded the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which later became known as Hiram College. Future United States President James A. Garfield was a student at the new college in the early 1850s and returned to it in 1858 to become President of the College. In 1857, Garfield also served as pastor at Franklin Circle Christian Church. The Church's members also included fervent supporters of the nineteenth century Temperance and Prohibition movements. Long time parishioner Abraham Teachout, a lumber merchant who lived on Franklin Avenue, was the church's Sunday School Superintendent for 25 years in the late nineteenth century. In 1884, he ran for Congress on the Prohibition ticket and remained a fervent Prohibitionist until his death in 1912.

Franklin Circle Christian Church today continues to engage in educational programs and social activism that serve a constituency very different from the Franklin Avenue neighborhood of the nineteenth century. Today, the Franklin Avenue neighborhood is home to many working class and immigrant families. The Church's outreach programs minister to the needs of this new community.

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The Italian Villa style house at 2905 Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City was built in 1874 by a businessman who, according to one local historian, zealously sought to avoid involvement in government--even though his extended family was deeply involved in politics for much of the nineteenth century. There is some gentle irony then that, for most of the twentieth century and for the first nineteen years of the twentieth first century, the Robert Russell Rhodes mansion was owned by Cuyahoga County, which used it to provide a variety of different government services to the public.

Robert Russell Rhodes (1846-1916) was a great-grandson of Josiah Barber, the west side pioneer from Connecticut who arrived in Brooklyn Township in 1818 and settled and developed 140 acres of land in what became the heart of Ohio City. In 1836, Barber served as the new city's first mayor. Robert Rhodes was also the oldest son of Daniel Pomeroy Rhodes, who, a decade after Josiah Barber settled in what became Ohio City, migrated to the area from Vermont, married Josiah Barber's granddaughter Sophia Russell, and soon became wealthy in the coal and iron industries. Daniel, a staunch Democrat, was active in local politics his entire adult life. In 1864, politics in the Rhodes family moved to a new level, when Daniel Rhode's daughter Charlotte Augusta married Republican Marcus Hanna, the man who many contend engineered the first modern day political campaign that put William McKinley in the White House in 1896.

Robert Russell Rhodes could never seem to avoid the political influences in his life--even when it came to his own marriage. In 1868, four years after his sister married Marcus Hanna, Robert married Kate Castle, who was the daughter of William B. Castle, a member of the Whig party and Ohio City's last mayor before its annexation to Cleveland in 1854. One year later, Castle was elected mayor of Cleveland--the first westsider to hold that office.

Robert Rhodes, who was heir to many of his father's business interests, spent much of his life on Franklin Circle. He grew up on the southeast side of Franklin Circle in the Rhodes family mansion and, following his marriage to Kate Castle, built his own mansion on the southwest side of Franklin Circle. During these years, Franklin Circle may have seemed to him to be almost like a Rhodes family park. The land for the circle had been donated by Robert's great-grandfather Josiah Barber, and most of the great homes and estates that surrounded the Circle in the mid- to late nineteenth century were owned by Rhodes family members, in-laws, and business associates.

In 1888, Robert Rhodes, like a number of other wealthy Franklin Avenue area residents of this era, sold his mansion on Franklin Circle and moved to Rockport Township--to a stretch of land along Lake Erie that later became the suburb of Lakewood. He died in Lakewood in 1916.

In 1914, Cuyahoga County purchased the Robert Russell Rhodes house from the heirs of John Meckes, a German immigrant ,who had in 1888 purchased the home from Robert Rhodes. In the 100 years that have elapsed since that purchase, the house has served the county as a juvenile detention home (1918-1932), a county nursing home (1939-1962), county welfare department (1962-1963), a school for disabled children (1963-1977), and as the county archives (1977-2019). After the county archives moved from the building, it was sold by the county and is currently being redeveloped as a 33-suite residential apartment building.

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